January 22, 2000

Pretty Packed

The snow continues to generally be very good, but not really Fernie's finest. Most places are soft packed and very nice, for packed, but there were some less appealing spots. I jumped into Cedar Bowl right a the top of the T-Bar and found some truly ugly hard pack for the first few turns,, followed by crud and frozen ice balls down to cat track. This seemed to be an anomaly though, for the rest of Cedar Ridge seemed fine with soft packed moguls and some mildly cruddy chopped stuff. There were also places where there was various degrees of wind crust and semi crud and you had to dig pretty deep into the barrel to find any powder turns, but overall things were pretty pleasant.

The White Pass chair died a little after noon, and I am not sure if it ever opened again. With it closed we encountered a bit of a wait at the Elk Chair, but that and the Face Lift were the only significant line ups I saw and neither was too bad.