Craig's Report - October 20, 2006

After a few soggy days of intermittent rain and a pretty dense fog this morning, the sun started putting in appearances around noon today. Alas it quickly became shy again and hid more and more as the afternoon wore on, particularly if I had the camera out. The forecasts are suggesting it will try harder over the weekend though. As would be expected at this time of year, the snow is still keeping to the highest peaks, well above the skiing area.

At 17:15 it is 9 C down at the house under and almost completely cloudy sky.


You don�t realize how many larch trees there are in the valley until fall. This from a little ways up lower Siberia Ridge.

Somehow I have never noticed this platform nailed to a couple of tree overhanging the cliff that drops from near the top of Siberia Ridge into Siberia Bowl. Almost invisible in this picture are two lines than run diagonally down above the cliff face. It would appear to be used for dropping explosives for avalanche control. I had no trouble resisting any temptation to climb up for a better view.

Timber Bowl, the top of the Timber chair and the new Lost Boys Cafe from Siberia Ridge,

The new toilet building (no water so I can�t really call them washrooms) has appeared and is larger than I expected, although frankly I am not sure what I did expect.

The exterior of the restaurant looks largely finished except for the upper windows. Dry wallers were at work in the interior.

Some cat work has been done over on the terrain park side of Falling Star, but I must admit I don�t really remember what was there before.

Beautiful downtown Cokato is in the background of this shot looking down Falling Star.

The clearing of the new shortcut down the bottom of Falling Star has produced a significant pile of logs. I had wondered about how well the higher speed traffic on the new route and the slower traffic coming down the old way would merge at the entrance to the cat track, but they seem to have cut the corner so it doesn�t look like it should be a problem.