Mt. Bachelor, OR, May 9-10, 2014

Tony Crocker

Administrator
Staff member
We decided to make our likely last ski trip of the season to Oregon. Liz had never been there, Mammoth is going to be bit more restricted than usual in May and finally Mt. Bachelor had extended operation of Northwest to May 11, potentially allowing 3000+ acres of skiing. And of course I was hoping for the widespread corn of several of my past spring trips there.

The weather had other ideas though, so this trip was quite different. We flew to Portland Thursday and it rained hard up to Government Camp, where it was still 50F at 4,000 feet. So even at Bachelor it rained on the mountain Thursday.

Friday looked like a tough day with only 3 inches new snow reported and ongoing wind, fog and snow with limited lift operation. Summit and Northwest were both closed and Outback was on “Storm Recovery,” which means manual deicing of lift towers from the extensive riming. The riming also means don’t expect to read some of the trail signs.
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With 3 days of scheduled skiing it was slightly cheaper to buy the $179 spring pass than 3 days of $62 lift tickets. We were not skiing until nearly 11AM and we spent 2+ hours just skiing Skyliner. Skyliner is the most wind sheltered of the open lifts and with 3 inches new snow over an unknown subsurface I thought its mellow intermediate pitch would be most appropriate.

The good news is that the rain/transition to wet snow resulted in almost no hard snow. The snow at the bottom of Skyliner and Pine Marten was wet, but up a couple hundred feet or so it skied quite well as long as you weren’t in someone else’s tracks. Here’s the Skyliner liftline.
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At the top of the lifts there was dense fog and gusty winds. We headed back to the West Village lodge about 1:20. Liz went in the lodge but since Outback had opened I went back up to check that out for a couple of runs. At this point the storm cranked up and it was snowing much harder, with “normal snowflakes” vs. the occasional graupel earlier in the day. Both wind and visibility were difficult, and since Outback had been open a couple of hours there were at least as many tracks as on Skyliner. I ducked into the trees for a short section where the new snow was smooth but here the subsurface was firm.

At 2PM closing I skied a very Braille run down Canyon to the lodge, finishing with 13,400 vertical, about 5K of dense powder.

Saturday morning the report was 7 inches overnight snow of medium density with maybe a couple more inches expected during the day. Summit was still out of the question while Northwest was now in “Storm Recovery.”

We expected a big day with clearing Sunday, so didn’t get on the hill until after 10AM. Northwest was already open so we headed that in that direction with 2 Outback runs on the way. The Outback runs were fairly tracked so we moved to Northwest. There was not much wind but the fog at the top of the lifts was as thick as Friday. How thick? The Pine Marten Lodge was not visible from the top of Outback and Liz saw it for the first time Sunday.

On our first Northwest run we caught a slight break in fog to enjoy a nice section of powder.
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Approaching tree line around 7,000 feet:
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The upper section of trees had varied density with occasional openings to a few connected turns.
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Lower down the pitch was mellower and the trees farther apart, although down there we would occasionally hit the firm subsurface. We emerged near the intersection of the catchline and the Sparks Lake trail about 5,900 feet.

Our second NW run we traversed a considerable distance skier’s left in the fog and dropped off when there were enough scattered shrubs to provide orientation. Again visibility improved a few hundred feet down and the tree section was shorter, hitting the catchline at 6,300, with quite a long run back to the lift. Next I tried to split the distance between the previous 2 runs. The alpine part was more windpacked than powder and the trees extended to 6,100 with the snow getting heavier down there.

Liz called it a day then but I had time for one more. This time I pushed farther out than before, getting lightly tracked alpine powder like the first 2 runs. Then I got lucky and ended up on top of this break in the trees, with the clouds also lifting off the bottom of Northwest.
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This was fluid untracked powder skiing almost to the catchline at 6,500 feet. Given the foggy approach from above I don’t know that I could find this stash again without local guidance though. Skiing back to Northwest South Sister came into partial view.
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As on Friday the final run back to West Village was pea soup most of the way. I skied 15,600 vertical, 7K of pretty decent powder. I’m sure it wasn’t the quality of what fell in Utah from this storm, but quite impressive for May.
 
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