January 02, 2001

Still No Presents from Griz

The holiday season has come and pretty much gone and there is still no significant new snow. Thus it was with a decided lack of enthusiasm that I headed up for a quick look around today. As I suspected, many parts of the mountain are pretty grim, but there was also some unexpectedly good stuff up there too.

They apparently opened Currie yesterday and on a run down 123, I found the soft packed moguls to be very fine indeed, despite the sometimes tricky visibility. Conditions remained very good all the way down to Trespass Trail, although one did have to watch out for the odd hazard (vegetable, not mineral) farther down. Below Trespass Trail things were dicier and the beginning of the ramp on the left of the gully was fairly ugly looking. However you could cut over to the mogul field on the skier's left of the gully and it was in good shape. It was much smaller than normal and eventually funneled you back to Gilmar's trail, but was nice skiing in soft moguls.

A later run farther over in the bowl found Currie Powder to be rather nasty with lots of rocks and other debris. The Currie Chutes remained closed.

I heard they also opened Red Tree, but when I got to the top of the Bear Chair there was a sign saying that the Haul Back was down due to mechanical problems. The prospect of slogging out of Gorbi Bowl wasn't all that appealing to my lazy spirit, so I just motored out Cascade, which okay in a shrubby kind of way.

I managed to skip most of the main traffic runs, but they did not look too pleasant. Rocks and gravel were clearly visible on Bear from the chair. The portion of Elk between the bottom of Bear and the bottom of the Bear Chair, previously the good route to the chair, was now getting pretty ugly.

Over on the new side there really isn't a good way to bottom of White Pass, although Silver Lining is at least manageable for now. Once you got there, you had better have wanted to go up as Deep Sea was completely closed. There were even folks shoveling snow out of the woods onto Deep Sea in a valiant, if pathetic, effort to put some sort of snow veneer on the rocks.

Farther down in the snow gun zone, the Deer runs, including Incline, were generally very good and carved nicely with few hazards. In fact the packed snow everywhere continues to be of very nice quality, if rather lacking in quantity.