joegm
New member
4 friends from work offering a free ticket for myself and the g man in excahnge for some lessons, made it bretton on wed... hadn't been there in over a year so it was nice to go back, and it's not like we gave up anything by not going to groom, er, loon. <BR>bretton on wed- temps about 20, pretty much blue bird in the am and partly cloudy in the pm.. full view of wash and the observatory... bretton's about 95% open.. the groomers were nice pp... place was empty as usual during the week... non groomer breakdown from west mtn across is : skiers left trees of the w mtn quad-, closed. skiers right trees off the w mtn q-, open and hardpacked, but edgable for sure... glade west-, hp and some loose super dry edgable and open... best line on the hill, imo.... moving over to the skiers far right off the new hsq they threw in....roz trees line was roped off and closed,,,we jumped it and could not really figure out why it was closed except for some technical turns required near the bottom run out gully ( so that would explain it for bretton ) ...2nd best line on the hill and we skied it about 6 times.. should have been open imo. the three or 4 different lines they have off the geren toll road they have , were all decent snow but sparse... would not want to bring anything but rock skis in there or pretty much anywhere in the trees at this point except for glade west which seemed to have more coverage fro some reason. it was nice to revisit the area i spent a lot of time at 2 years ago , but as my buddy gil said as he was yawning, " this about fills the bretton fix for the next 2 years "... it is remarkable though how much better snow bretton gets than loon or cannon . oh yeah, the storm totals from tuesday/wednesday... loon, none... bretton none.... <BR> k on thurs- having felt like we haven't skied a full on , get loose and warm, leg pumpin, killer day in over 6 weeks, we were stoked for k...especially since it appeared they got something from tuesday's event. made good time and pulled into bear about 8:15...about 5 cars in the bear lot.. blue bird.. about 10 f at base of bear with slight wind...rode up the bear triple .. about 80 % up the wind ominously started to kick up... OL looked scoured ( not bumped ) so we slide over to vertigo to try and warm up.. vertigo had some killer wind blown in between hardpacked bumps.. hit that 2 times off the stage 2 and went reconing...on the cut through to vertigo , noticed that wild thing under the needles eye q looked good... it was... loaded with untracked windblown of up to 2 feet, we hit that 3 times...and headed back to bear... on the way back to bear a ( not so ) funny thing happened... it got real windy... and that was the begining of the end , my friends...hit wildfire ( killer windblown on skiers far left with bumps ) down to bear claw ( nice, not great, powder capped bumps with windpacked in the troughs ) hit that 2 times... both rides back up the bear trip though , were uncomfortable with the wind.. went in for lunch and a plan to pound wildfire to bearclaw for the rest of the day... half way through lunch , saw that bear triple was shut down... uh oh.... they were spinning the fix q next to it... on to the fixed q, post lunch... it was moving about 2 mph and the winds felt like 40 to 50... that killed the wildfire bearclaw route for the afternoon, my man g said " thats all right , we'll just hit vertigo/ wildthing... but i wasn't buying it... i had a bad feeling the stage 2 gondy was down...and lo and behold it was.... from 12 to 1 , they progressively started shutting down the mountain... by 1 pm , there was really nothing left but the k 1 ( don't know how they ran that ) and the snowden q... in total shock at the sudden turn of events, we threw the bags into the car and drove over to the snowden q, for one last gasp.. the k 1 only got you groomers or cascade ( which was junk ) and it was , once again, for what seems like the 6th straight week, too cold to just make gs turns on groomers... the ride up the snowden q was brutal with the wind... not really knowing k that well yet, we were pleasantly surprised to find a killer tree line ( low rider ) off the snowden q ... it was loaded with loose p, but the base is still low, if that makes sense.. you could feel your talis sliding stumps in places... would have skied it more , but the ride up was too cold.. we threw it in early ( for the 4th straight week ) at about 2pm. from what we saw of k on thurs , any new snow they picked up is now gone or blown off piste.. the groomer's were all rock hard wind blown ( even the greens ) our man haskell at fred's free ride told us he grabbed the devils fiddle for 1 poach early on and had some knee deep wind blown, but it still is not really ready...the winter of discontent continues...the next few days at k don't look good for temps and wind from what i've seen... if you have the option, might be worth holding off and seeing what happens on tuesday ( storm??? ) back next thurday and friday, from who the hell knows where at this point