A
Anonymous
Guest
I knew something big was coming when the local news was filled with live shots of shrill reporters crying about the terrible snow that fell above 2500' in the Oakland and San Jose hills. Winter was back. <BR> <BR>We left a rainy Livermore way too late (my corworkers are hardly winter sports fanatics--even in a scientist/engineer sense). It didn't matter, though, because within 100 yards of passing the 2000' elevation sign on rt. 88, heavy snow appeared, soon followed by the CalTrans tire inspectors. Carson Spur (7990') was blocked due to drifting, and all we could do it get in line and wait for the rotory plows to do their thing and clear the road. <BR> <BR>Our delays paid off, though--after a five-minute pause at 7000', the Big Blowers appeared coming down from the pass and the gates opened. Wow. Wow. Wow. Yeah, they got 12"--yesterday. They also got 12" last night. They may have received 12" during the day today. The winds moved it around and filled in the tired patches. Wow. The temperatures plunged, the winds howled, and light, dry, cold, fluffy snow poured from the sky. The sun went to San Diego to hide for the day. <BR> <BR>We skied all sorts of stuff, and I really should take a look at the trail map before I forget where I've been. We started out on a few black groomers, giving my coworkers a chance to figure out how this powder thing works. We soon moved to Sentinel Bowl, enjoyed real Northeastern-style wind-scouring on the traverse, and dumped out onto an amazing winter wonderland. We skipped the obvious routes and traversed out into a woodsy, cliffy, snowy area that was on the trail map but wasn't labeled with any kind of trail names. <BR> <BR>Here were rocky chutes, feeding into glades of towering pines, feeding into open slopes of untracked powder. Everything was buried in bottomless fluff, equal to some of the best I've seen in VT or UT. We soared past twisted California junipers, around huge Ponderosas, between rough boulders that showed none of the billion years of weathering I'd always noted in the Appalachians. My companions struggled in the deep snow, but immediately appreciate the solitude, the road and chairlift-free views, and the beauty of nature. <BR> <BR>The quiet, monotone, usually unemotional combustion scientist (who I worried about continuously) skis awkwardly up to my perch, faceplants hugely into the powder-covered bank, and exclaims, "This is amazing! Is this that woods-skiing thing you were talking about? Hey, look at the view!" <BR> <BR>More converts! <BR> <BR>A little bit of sun had leaked in from the Central Valley to illuminate our view, though, and this angered the karma. Out of nowhere, clouds moved in, a cold wind blew up from the gully below, and down came the snow. Not flurries, not showers, but a blizzard of snow--all in tiny, light, icy-cold flakes. We followed the streambed down into a white sea, with only trivial density differences between the snow under our skis, over our boots, around our legs, in our face, and blowing over our heads. It was a 3D continuum of frozen whiteness. We found the lift, and skied the run again, and again, and again, trying different gullies, streambeds, and glades each time. Each lift ride left us buried under a blanket of accumulated snow. Most of the Bay Area tourons were hiding in the lodge by this time, and we saw few people besides a group of telemarkers who clearly had found something remarkable over on skier's left but weren't going to tell us about it. <BR> <BR>Fatigue set in, so we merely moved to something with a shorter traverse, finding more untracked (it was falling so fast that tracks didn't last) in something called "The Drain" and the gullies surrounding it. We raced through the snow and squeaked in a last lift ride just as the liftie pulled the rope across the corral behind us. <BR> <BR>Wow. That was a good day.