I didn't get out until after noon today and had to be back early, so I only had time for a quick flit across the mountain. It had been clear last night and was cloudy most of the morning, so I wasn't expecting things to be great, but I was pleasantly surprised. My neighbor had told me there was some nice powder beside Cruiser off of the Face Lift and so there was. This area is relatively flat and not terribly long, but getting a dozen or so powder turns was still worth the ride up the meat hook.
I was surprised to find that the Hut Trail traverse from the top of Bear was
now a cat track that went all of the way over to Blueberry. I can't say I recall
them having done that before, although that probably says more about my memory
than history. Fortunately the trail was well marked with poles to prevent a
rude shock to blissed out folks coming from above making lazy powder turns.
Over in the Blueberry trees and Snake Main, there were still a surprising number of soft turns available. It was certainly well tracked and the snow was a bit stiff, but still quite decent and much better than I expected. The KC chutes were more what I had anticipated, with some not bad snow mixed in with scraped icy sections and somewhat chunky crud.
The often evil Lower North Ridge was soft and corn like today. I have been meaning to take my GPS with me skiing all winter and I finally remembered to stick it in my pack today. When I got on the Boom chair I had a look at it and was amazed to discover that my max speed had been 82 km/h. This was probably on the cruise down Lower North Ridge or perhaps on the run out to the Haul back. In any event at no point was I tucking anything or running even close to the edge of my comfort zone, but rather I made a point of just skiing normally. They had been playing with a radar gun on the hill earlier this year and the speeds I had heard reported seemed ridiculously high to me, but perhaps not..
On my new side check out run I decided to skip the ice that I feared would be on Puff and I just cruised down Heartland. This had some large icy sections, but had been groomed fairly recently and was easily navigated.
In Currie there was little that wasn't well worked over on the North facing
slopes, but the snow up top was still soft and the turning pretty easy. Farther
down things got cruddier and the upper part of the run out to Deer was quite
slick. The lower runs were soft and corn like though.
At 3:30 P.M. it is 6C at the house with a mainly cloudy sky.
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