schubwa
New member
When I left the ski area on Saturday afternoon I had high hopes for a real bell-ringer on Sunday. It was snowing in sheets and so soft and nice. So I raced up yesterday only to find a full blown lay down blizzard. The parking lot was in pretty good shape but the slopes looked ravaged. I joined the line on Pine Martin but it didn't look good. At nine they opened Red Chair which is fairly protected and in a few minutes there was a huge line. Nothing else opened yesterday of note, all the worthwhile lower lifts were on wind hold.
Tom and I took a few runs and the snow was pretty wind hammered, more like stiff merange pie. I felt sorry for the skiers, even with their gigantic wide skis. We went in for coffee and then left for town. But folks were determined to suffer the same fate and so there was a long line just to park in the main lot! But we soon discovered the entire parking lot at Sunrise Lodge and for Skyliner Lift were closed and there was this huge line of cars parked along Century Drive, something I have NEVER seen before. You're not allowed to park on that road at any time (usually). It looked like holiday weekend parking nightmare at Mammoth Mountain below Chair Two stretching all the way down to the Earthquake Fault! The lifts usually served by those lots never opened all day. Then the unthinkable happened, after we pick up our God-given four feet of new snow, it starts to "wintry mix" as they like to call it. So all the new snow gets covered by rime and crust and the lifts get iced. The only thing that didn't happen was the biblical swarm of locust to arrive and eat everbody's ski clothes off their backs!
Well, today is a new day, the sun is out and we have a 78" base at mid but the picture tells the story. They are still chipping the ice off Pine Martin. What a drag!