Matt Duffy
New member
First day back on skis in nearly a week. I've feverishly read all the Vermont reports, and I've watched the zeros add up to nothing in the Loveland snow report for days on end. I didn't have high expectations going into today. <BR> <BR> In the morning, before I left, I checked the snow report and what do you know! Four inches new at 5:30am, snowing heavily with snow tapering off in the afternoon. It was hard to say how much new there was when I finally got my lazy, hung-over carcass up to the hill at 11am. The parking lot had obviously been plowed in the morning, yet there was about 5" of fresh light fluffy stuff on it. <BR> <BR> On the hill, winds had played some major games. Some aspects held dust on crust conditions; the crust formed by days of above freezing temperatures. But here's a great thing about Loveland- because of it's horse-shoe shape and the character of the terrain, there are sweet lines that face in every direction. Follow or flee the sun, or in todays case, chase the drifting powder. <BR> <BR> I skied a bottomless run after a traverse along the ridge. I hit hog heaven in a filled in gully elsewhere that sprayed snow against my stomach and chest for two straight runs. The highlight moment for me today was when I was flooring it down some deep snow and hovering from lip to lip of ripply drifts. It was a 3 or 4 foot drop from one to the next, but the next was apparantly an optical illusion. I dropped right through it like it wasn't even there. Down another 3 feet of unexpected bonus air onto the steep soft powder pitch below into a very fast runout. <BR> <BR>By 3 o'clock I'd had my fill. A weekday at Loveland is, well... like an uncrowded weekday anywhere else that has great snow and a vast amount of terrain. It wasn't one of the top ten days of the year, but it was very good none-the-less.