Powdery Xmas Presents at Crystal

After a 3 year absence from skiing Crystal, we were greeted incredibly warmly on Xmas Eve with 9 inches of new snow, light crowds and excellent weather. But like some of my friends, a warm welcome rapidly becomes a celebration involving excess Double Dead Guy consumption, which is enjoyable, but challenging. That’s Crystal for you. By noon we’d skied lines in Powder Bowl, Bear Pits and Green Valley that are as steep as you can ski anywhere. It’s a great, kick-ass mountain.

The crowds were focused on the huckster lifts (Northway, Chair 6), but even these diminished by 11am as the local pow hounds headed home. At 15F, the snow had come down super light, and in places was seriously deep due to the wind pushing it around. You didn’t have to try hard to find fresh or lightly tracked snow all day. It was everywhere, even at 4pm. I love Xmas skiing!

Xmas Eve at Crystal

Xmas Eve at Crystal

Xmas Eve at Crystal – Powder Bowl

Xmas Eve at Crystal

Xmas Eve at Crystal

Xmas Eve at Crystal

Xmas Eve at Crystal – Bear Pits

Xmas Eve at Crystal

Xmas Eve at Crystal

Xmas Day dawned cold and mostly clear. The groomers were as good as you get, ever, anywhere, and we spent the day alternating between warp speed carving and play in the pow. The runs into Snorting Elk Bowl were especially sweet, offering steep winchcat groomed and soft, chalky bumps to play on. Even the Crystal Glacier, aka Middle Ferk’s Run, was skiing so well we lapped it three times.

With Crystal’s incredible scenery and terrain, and deep snowpack from wild December weather, this day had a ‘calm before the storm’ feeling. We reveled in having one of the best ski hills in the world to ourselves (relatively speaking) for a day. I suspect it wasn’t that  way the next day …

Xmas Day at Crystal – Powder Bowl

Xmas Day at Crystal – Green Valley

Xmas Day at Crystal

Xmas Day at Crystal

Xmas Day at Crystal

Xmas Day at Crystal – Powder Bowl

Xmas Day at Crystal

Xmas Day at Crystal

Xmas Eve 8100m, Xmas Day 8200m vert

Season Totals 14 days, 103,400m vert, 9 powder day

 

Snoqualmie Pass Pillow Riding

Amazingly, we have never skied Snoqualmie before this weekend. And to be honest, it wouldn’t surprise me if we never ski it in better conditions than this weekend.

Pow was puking down like dandruff at a hippy head banging commune. Sunday was slightly heavy snow early, but lightened up by noon. Monday’s pow was absolutely primo. And both days were deep and deserted. Thank you Seahawks Sunday home game! A foot fell just between 10 and 3pm on Monday on our truck in the parking lot. There was a lot more up top. What truly fabulous skiing.

The riding amped up Sunday when I found the Wildside chair at Summit West. The runs around the back were deep and untracked. Under the lift was pillow riding madness, exploding deep snow on mostly buried trees and boulders. An hour of wild, white room stuff it truly was.

Taking the cat track to Summit Central, I dropped into  Parachute. The line on the left side was totally untracked, At 11am on Sunday. 20 thigh deep turns with face shots all the way down was the reward. The terrain is short, but genuinely steep.

Summit at Snoqualmie – Sunday

Summit at Snoqualmie – Wildside

Summit at Snoqualmie – Sunday – Wildside

Summit at Snoqualmie – Sunday

Summit at Snoqualmie – Sunday

Summit at Snoqualmie – Sunday

Summit at Snoqualmie – Parachute

Summit at Snoqualmie – Summit Central

Summit at Snoqualmie – Sunday

Summit at Snoqualmie – Sunday

The plan Monday was to hit Alpental, but only Summit Central was open. This turned out to be no problem, as the Silver Fir express chair was running, delivering access to 5 pow-filled chutes and trees. The snow was falling so fast that there simply weren’t enough people riding to track it out. Even lightly. It was amazing skiing all day. Even the green groomer runouts delivered faceshots if you went fast enough!

We wrapped up the day with a couple of great tree runs off the Triple 60 chair. Freefall was literally waist deep by 3pm, and Ripcord, despite it’s slanting fall line, had huge pillows by the trees that were just begging to be smashed. I did my best.

Summit Central

Summit Central

Summit Central steeps

Summit Central

Summit Central – 1pm dumpage

Summit Central – 15 minute break snowfall 🙂

Summit Central pow

Summit Central – Ripcord

no boots – parking lot snow!!

Car after 5 hours in parking lot!

What a truly wonderful 2 days! It snowed up there today and they lost power. Who knows what will happen tomorrow. There’s more snow forecast for tonight. Much more. I may just have to head up. Snoqualmie Pass road conditions permitting!!!

Sunday 5600m vert, Monday 6500m vert

Season Totals 12 days, 87,100m vert, 7 powder days

 

 

The Pow continues at Beaver Creek

Our flight from Seattle landed in Denver early. The bags were out before we got to the baggage claim. The rental car bus came literally as we stepped outside, and 10 minutes later we were cruising in a brand new Jeep Grand Cherokee towards Beaver Creek. As we crossed Vail pass, it started dumping. The Curse was broken, and this was going to be 2 top ski days.

Beave Creek

Charlotte at Beaver Creek

Beaver Creek

Charlotte at Beave Creek

Charlotte at Beave Creek

Charlotte at Beaver

Charlotte at Beave Creekr

Beave Creek

Beaver Creek

Beaver

Tuesday was a snowy, dark, grey powder day. 6-8 inches had blanketed the hill, and although it was vaguely busy for the first two hours with local powder hounds, there was plenty of freshies to go around. Beaver has typical Colorado terrain, mostly cruisy with some steeper pitches and fun trees. The pow wasn’t Colorado-perfect blower, but it skied fine. We had a ball exploring, ripping boot deep groomer pow early, and then poking around bumps and trees on Grouse Mountain and Larkspur for the rest of the day. For day one of her season, our visiting Aussie boarder was ripping the deepest pow of her life in no time.

Tuesday night it got cold. 5F cold. The snow dried out, and Wednesday dawned brighter, the sun occasionally poking out. In many ways this was a better day then Tuesday. There was literally hardly anyone skiing. The groomed was a fast highway to heaven. The abundant remaining pow was effortless to ski. We had a ball playing in the trees off the Larkspur and Strawberry Park chairs, and skiing dangerously fast on Centennial.

Beaver Creek

Beaver Creek – huge lines at 8.55am 🙂

Beaver Creek

Beaver Creek

Beaver Creek

Beaver Creek

Beaver Creek

Beaver Creek

Beaver Creek

Beaver Creek

Beaver Creek

Beaver Creek

Beaver Creek

Beaver Creek

Beaver Creek

Beaver Creek

It’s hard not to have fun at Beaver and the many CO resorts on the I70 corridor. There’s some very fine, cruisey skiing. It does tend to empty your wallet rather quickly though, and even in two days I got tired of the endlessly friendly workers. Cleaning steps in the village of snow. Carrying our skis. Packing our bags on departure. Indulging in friendly, inane conversations. Always with a smile of course. It must fucking hurt to smile that much after a while.

I know the predominantly affluent east coast and southern clientele, on their annual ski weeks, love this type of service. Personally I’m happier with some dirtbag, tatooed, dreadlocked ski bums hanging out in the day lodge or scummy bar, chatting with locals. I suspect if we’d stayed in Avon, that would have been possible.

Next time.

There’s a good chance there will be a next time, when we get that Epic Season pass. One day. As I ain’t paying $150 for a day pass again. My Mission Ridge season pass is only just over twice that amount!

Tuesday 10,600m, Wednesday 7700m vert

Season Totals: 10 days, 75,000m vert, 5 powder days

Powder Weekend at Mission Ridge

It was about 10.30 Saturday morning at Mission. Already two or so inches of pow had come down, and while stood at the top of the Tillikum run, I heard some locals say ‘this is already better than any time last season’. I don’t normally give credence to idle ski hill gossip, but this was convincing as it was the third such comment I’d heard in an hour. The conditions were in fact very good, and getting better every minute. And last season must have been terrible indeed – a good one to miss 🙂

It pretty much snowed from 9am Saturday until 10am Sunday. Good early conditions were transformed to a ‘free refills every run’ powder day by early Saturday afternoon. This was superb skiing – there were so few people and so much snow you could leave fresh tracks on groomers by mid afternoon. Every run.

Saturday morning

fresh tracks 3pm Saturday

Sunday morning

Black diamond get off

Mission Ridge views

Mission Ridge views

Mission Ridge views

Mission Ridge views

By Sunday 13+ inches had come down. Unfortunately Sunday morning suffered the Barwin Curse of the Liberator quad remaining stationary due to weather. Luckily The Curse broke by noon, and while most of the pow was crusted by the wind, the groomers and off piste areas protected from the wind were primo.

This storm will have done wonders to the ski hill base. If the weather doesn’t get crazy El Nino warm and wet, Mission could have a pretty good season. It’s certainly looking promising right now, but El Nino years are about as predictable as the GOP primaries, and sometimes a lot less entertaining. Keep those fingers and toes crossed everyone, and drink Ullr with vigor!!

Saturday 8800m, Sunday 5700m vert

Season totals: 6 days, 46,400m vert, 1 powder day

 

 

 

Whistler at Thanksgiving

Oh how I love Thanksgiving traditions. Whistler open already, Blackcomb opening day, Sushi Village for dinner. Deserted runs. It’s heaven. OK- not quite your traditional Thanksgiving traditions, but seemingly almost as reliable.

My rule-of-thumb is that if the snow depth reported on the Whistler Web site at Pig Alley is 1m, then the mid and upper mountains are in pretty fine shape. It hovered around 80cm on this visit, so I was a little reticent about the cover. There was no real worry though, as cold weather had turned the mountains into something akin to Killington, with fresh gun pow making sure the groomers were fun and fast all weekend. Off groomed was variable, but there was great fun to be had as long of you carefully hopped over occasional shrubbery, logs, rocks and open creeks and, ahem, crevasses.

The Roundhouse

Catskinner bumps

The crew

Crevasses!!!

Top of Solar Coaster

The crew on Blackcomb

Greg-zea

Whistler doing a Killington impression

Blackcomb base

By Saturday Whistler was open top-to-bottom, and the Blackcomb ski out was groomed and ready to roll, making it rude not to hit apres at Merlins. This seemed a suitably magical way to end some fine November skiing!

Thursday 8000m, Friday 9400m, Saturday 8500m very

Season Totals; 4 days, 31,900m vertical