Ending our season Down Under – A week at Thredbo

When we arrived at Thredbo at the end of July, winter had been pretty kind to the mountain considering less than a metre of snow had fallen all season. Cold temperatures, wind blown snow off the Main Range onto the top 1/3rd of the mountain, and good old gun pow made for some firm if actually quite nice skiing.

It was a bit like East Coast USA skiing really.

With gum trees.

And meat pies.

And good coffee.

Our first day was classic Aussie skiing. Very wet snow at the base, transitioning to soft snow up high, driven by persistent winds at the peaks. Visibility remained ok and hence we poked around the whole mountain, following our local guides Sue and Rob to reacquaint ourselves with the terrain. Not a bad first day at all.

The next day was bluebird and cold-ish. More overnight snow and wind had created some quite fabulous snow up high. We hit the Bluff, and then the T bars, finding powdery goods in abundance around Michaels Mistake. It wasn’t deep but it was sure sweet. The sun hung around for another day, so we kept ripping lines through Bush Ranger and around the Snowgums chair, interspersed with some long fine firm fast groomers.

Above Merrits

Skiers left of Michaels Mistake

Below Karels

By the end of our 3rd day, the groomers were hanging in due to gun pow top ups, but off piste was getting a little sketchy. Luckily, it started to snow. light at first, then reasonably, and finally pretty big time. In 3 days we got around 40cms plus considerable wind load up high. This created some classic Thredbo skiing!

Groomer pow on Supertrail

First tracks on Funnelweb

Top of Cannonball

Bush ranger

Highlights were first tracks on Funnelweb (and about 4th tracks the following day). some great crazy high speed runs through the Snowgums trees, and as the wind kept blowing, soft sweet turns every run on the top of the mountain. It took until 2.30pm Saturday for the winds to get strong enough to close down the high speed lifts. By that time we were happy to call it quits on an 80 day ski season 🙂

Thanks Thredbo for a fine old week!

6 days: 7500m, 8500m, 10500m, 10200m, 10300m, 8200m vert

Final 2016-2017 Season totals: 80 days, 675,100m vert, 20 powder days

Closing weekend at Mt Bachelor 2017

Another year, another crazy fun ski weekend on Memorial weekend at Mt Bachelor. Due to this very belated post, I’ll just summarize below.

Thursday and Friday were perfect, deserted, Spring ski conditions. A solid freeze overnight followed by sun and light winds made for ‘go anywhere’ conditions, as long as you followed the sun from east to west around the mountain. Some truly great skiing.

Cows Face

above Pine Marten lift

Cows Face

Off the Summit towards NWX

Friday night we lost the hard freeze. There was still enormous fun to be had for the next two days, especially with us all dressed in ridiculous costumes. We ended the season with the traditional Summit hike, shots on the top, and a rip roaring run down the creamy west side chutes to the top of the Northwest Chair and then on to Old Skyliner and the bar.

Traversing in our best outfits 🙂

From the Summit

chairlift beauties

The Crew

Corny teleturns

Pond skimmers

Scary 🙂

After the lifts closed – our Summit shots before the run down

‘Til next year … in the North America anyway. We still had one ski trip to go this season 🙂

9500m, 8300m, 6700m, 6300m vert

Season totals: 74 days, 619,900m vert, 18 powder days