Crowds thin, bases firm

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Another beautiful bluebird day lured me out for my afternoon ski. The visitors for the Martin Luther King holiday weekend have left, leaving a mostly empty mountain. The first run on Shadows threw me around a little as the snow covering the terrain features was stiff and unforgiving. I opted for a cruiser below Duster and into Moonlight, which was very carevable. Then, up Sundown to ski the left side of Westside, which always has soft snow at the end of the day.

Up Sundown again and over to Typhoon to find pockets of soft snow, which continued in the recently thinned trees on Drop Out. The final run up top was upper Closet to Twister, which was firmer than I would have liked. The southern aspects of the trail near the bottom were beginning to soften from the sun, but it did not last long before the trail tilted away from south.

Why Not trees also had stiff tracked powder on the lower mountain, and the left side of Vertigo was a bit softer than most of the turns today. The longer range models do have a pattern change advertised starting in about a week, but details are evolving.