Carvemeister
New member
Well, looks like all that fresh powder either got skied off over the weekend, or blew into the woods. <BR> <BR>Turned out to be a decent, slightly better than average first trip of the season, but nothing very special following "the big storm." Looked like ~20% of the mountain was open. The non-snowmaking trails still had thin cover (some open) to extremely thin cover (closed)and need a good dump of wet snow to stick before they can open. <BR> <BR>I optimistically left my rock skis home and had my new Intuitiv 74's so I only risked one or two thin cover trails. Snowboarders and those with rock skis had a little more variety available, and the natural snow on those trails had nice soft bumps on loose gravel and grass. <BR> <BR>There was little advanced terrain open. East Fall was smooth, firm paved powder with some soft bumps along the edges. Cascade was in good shape with well spaced PP bumps on hard PP, and Lower Skylark had big soft bumps with some sticky wet manmade on Wednesday. That was about it for Avanced terrain. <BR> <BR>Skylark was the best run top to bottom with good PP all the way down. Most of the open terrain had good PP with just a few windblown or skied off spots. The runs off the Snowdon chair had the best, most consistent conditions and were perfect for making big high speed GS turns. We even rode the poma and scammed a few runs off the gates at the Race Clinic while they were out to lunch. Very nice! <BR> <BR>Nice snow for the beginners over at Rams Head. Took 2 runs there out of boredom. Got a little sick of the long boring runout from the bottom of the Canyon area back to the gondola as well, since the canyon chair was closed. <BR> <BR>All in all, not a bad start, but can get boring quickly until they open some more terrain. I may make another 2 day trip next week depending on the weather.