Castle Mt., AB, Feb. 27-28

[Tony Crocker]

For the third consecutive day, wind impacted lift operations. At Castle that is a very big deal. On the main mountain a closed Red chair loses almost as high a proportion of accessible terrain as losing Marte at Las Lenas does. Fortunately this year Castle has a new chair, Stagecoach, that serves the area formerly used for cat skiing. It is located beyond the Huckleberry chair, which was added in 2006 to give Castle some low intermediate groomed runs.

Tseeb and I headed that to start our day Friday anyway as I always want to check out new additions. We were lucky to share our first ride with Leonard, a southern Alberta cattle rancher (and for 10 years a rodeo bull rider!) who was eager to show us around.

Stagecoach is pitched more like the main mountain that I have loved since 1999.

The new chair is a detachable quad made available when Sunshine upgraded Angel Express to a six-pack. So here's rare sight of some skier density at Castle.

But off trail it's not much different from the rest of Castle.

Leonard led us through a few variations of Haig and Whitebark Bowls, then taking the Mountainside Road to top of Huckleberry before returning to Stagecoach. He said the terrain closes out in the denser trees below the road. The map is somewhat misleading. The lift is 1,824 vertical and about half of that is above Mountainside Road.

We also skied the Boundary Road . The return Skidaddle Traverse has some flat spots but not too bad once you learn where they are. We finished the Stagecoach tour along the ridge run Giddy-Up. It has a bird;s eye view of the south chutes on the main mountain.

Desperado is dead center of the pic with High rustler to its left and Lone Star to its right.

A scenic feature skiing Giddy-Up:

We took a break and had some soup. Temperatures were mid-20'sF but you can see the Great Gray North skies. Stagecoach had occasional wind gusts at the very top. I had to look on amp to see Stagecoach's orientation. The lift line faces northeast, so no surprise it was all winter snow.

We returned to Stagecoach as I had to check out what it was like below the Mountainside Road. We skied Rock-It, which looked the widest on the trail map. It narrowed enough to develop moguls but they were manageable. They were still a workout, so after a final Haig Bowl run, I skied to the base with 19,100 vertical.

Tseeb hung around for one more Stagecoach run, then found out Red chair had temporarily opened and took one run from the top in bad vis that was in the vicinity of High Plains.

 

[Tony Crocker]

Saturday as expected the weather cleared and in the morning there was zero wind even at the top of Red chair. We got there early but it was busy and here was the parking lot attendant directing traffic.

Both the original T-bar and the pizza restaurant are named T-Rex.

There was an inch of reported new snow, but you have to check out how that might have been distributed by the wind. Behind the weak cold front the early morning temperature was 8F at our hotel in Pincher Creek and 10F at Castle's base.

Sometime in the past there had probably been an upslope wind event as there was a lot of sastrugi at initial drop in points. There was also occasional firm chalk under the new snow on Sheriff and Drifter. You had to be on guard that every random fifth turn or so might be faster than you expected. Partway down Drifter:

The Stagecoach chair is on the other side of those cliffs.

Tamarack is usually a safe bet for blown-in snow, but the upper part above Tseeb here had been mostly stripped.

We returned later via the bowl at upper left that was all soft packed powder. During the 10:30-11:30 peak the Red chair lift line got close to 10 minutes. We tested the North side run Chinook and found the snow all soft out there, before taking a soup break.

We got back on the mountain during peak lunch hour so the lines were shorter, so we skied groomed Bandito and the softer line in Tamarack Bowl first. Then we tried Lone Pine, the first and usually most reliable South Chute. There were a few firm turns up top but the rest was consistently soft though not as deep as on several prior visits.

Next we skied farther out the North side to the steeper North Star and North Bowl runs.

Snow was good for the whole 2,000 vertical.

We finished with a groomer under the blue chair, total 19,000 vertical. We needed to hit the road by 2:30 with a nearly 5 hour drive to Great Falls Montana ahead of us.