I should have known when Tseeb declined my invitation to join us at Mammoth that we might get a primo corn day. 
This has happened 3x before.
We got out at 8:30 Tuesday morning to clear skies and a solid overnight freeze. What got my attention first was a race course starting at the top of Cornice Bowl.
I have seen courses set about 1/3 of the way up many times but this is the first time from the top. This was for the US Men’s Ski Team. We thought we would check that out later but they were done at 9:15.
The first run on Stump Alley was already in corn mode at the bottom. A second exploratory run around to the lower race courses had corn on Rusty’s but firmly frozen above and on Broadway, We returned to Stump for 2 runs of ideal corn top to bottom a little before 9AM.
We skied Face of 3 and Coyote to chair 5. There was another race course set on the lower half of Solitude but the rest of Solitude was butter smooth. This is when I realized what kind of a day this would be. Usually skier traffic chews up Solitude before the ideal corn stage, but not on Tuesday. With the lower crowds we hit Solitude 3x for perfect corn. This is the run where both Garry Klassen and I have had collision injuries and for which the local unofficial name is "Multitude."
Next we took the gondola to the top to check out the US Ski team route. Cornice was good but we could see that Gremlin’s and World Cup were still hard. So we reran the chair 3, Coyote, chair 5, Solitude circuit one more time. I tested Climax, which had the 3 inches new from last weekend irregularly spread over the old base and was a lot of work.
We hit Cornice the second time around 10:30. Even though Gremlin’s/World Cup/St.Anton had been open to the public over an hour, so few people had skied it that it was all butter smooth corn. We ran 3 more perfect corn laps via chairs 1 and 23, meeting Garry after the second one. Most of the chair 23 runs had similar snow as Climax and were not being skied, cutting down the number of skiers dropping into lower St. Anton.
Riding chair 23 The Hulk remains unchanged for a decade now but this year’s new action figure El Chapulin Colorado looks bent over from the weather since December.
Viewed from the top of 23, the White Mountains in the distance looked covered from this weekend’s storm despite being almost bare April 9-10 and Mammoth getting only 2-3 inches.
Scotty’s noon – 1PM had excellent corn after recent grooming, as did the lower race courses after the racers were done.
At 1:30 I rode the gondola to check out Dave’s, which was similar to Climax though late in the day the subsurface was softer. I barely made it to chair 5 before 2PM closing. Groomed Sanctuary looked bulletproof when we were riding 5 in the morning. But at 2PM it served up a grand finale of the day’s perfect corn. Again this was due to the low crowd. On April 9-10 this groomed area was skied far too much before it softened and thus had bumps and clumps when it did.
My total vertical was 31,400. Liz skied 30,300, which is the most since her knee replacement and one of maybe five 30K+ days since we met 14 years ago.
At the end of the day we often see Kirk AKA Mountain Monster tailgating in the chair 2 parking lot with his dog. He said Tuesday was Mammoth's best ski day of the past 3 weeks.
This has happened 3x before.We got out at 8:30 Tuesday morning to clear skies and a solid overnight freeze. What got my attention first was a race course starting at the top of Cornice Bowl.
I have seen courses set about 1/3 of the way up many times but this is the first time from the top. This was for the US Men’s Ski Team. We thought we would check that out later but they were done at 9:15.
The first run on Stump Alley was already in corn mode at the bottom. A second exploratory run around to the lower race courses had corn on Rusty’s but firmly frozen above and on Broadway, We returned to Stump for 2 runs of ideal corn top to bottom a little before 9AM.
We skied Face of 3 and Coyote to chair 5. There was another race course set on the lower half of Solitude but the rest of Solitude was butter smooth. This is when I realized what kind of a day this would be. Usually skier traffic chews up Solitude before the ideal corn stage, but not on Tuesday. With the lower crowds we hit Solitude 3x for perfect corn. This is the run where both Garry Klassen and I have had collision injuries and for which the local unofficial name is "Multitude."
Next we took the gondola to the top to check out the US Ski team route. Cornice was good but we could see that Gremlin’s and World Cup were still hard. So we reran the chair 3, Coyote, chair 5, Solitude circuit one more time. I tested Climax, which had the 3 inches new from last weekend irregularly spread over the old base and was a lot of work.
We hit Cornice the second time around 10:30. Even though Gremlin’s/World Cup/St.Anton had been open to the public over an hour, so few people had skied it that it was all butter smooth corn. We ran 3 more perfect corn laps via chairs 1 and 23, meeting Garry after the second one. Most of the chair 23 runs had similar snow as Climax and were not being skied, cutting down the number of skiers dropping into lower St. Anton.
Riding chair 23 The Hulk remains unchanged for a decade now but this year’s new action figure El Chapulin Colorado looks bent over from the weather since December.
Viewed from the top of 23, the White Mountains in the distance looked covered from this weekend’s storm despite being almost bare April 9-10 and Mammoth getting only 2-3 inches.
Scotty’s noon – 1PM had excellent corn after recent grooming, as did the lower race courses after the racers were done.
At 1:30 I rode the gondola to check out Dave’s, which was similar to Climax though late in the day the subsurface was softer. I barely made it to chair 5 before 2PM closing. Groomed Sanctuary looked bulletproof when we were riding 5 in the morning. But at 2PM it served up a grand finale of the day’s perfect corn. Again this was due to the low crowd. On April 9-10 this groomed area was skied far too much before it softened and thus had bumps and clumps when it did.
My total vertical was 31,400. Liz skied 30,300, which is the most since her knee replacement and one of maybe five 30K+ days since we met 14 years ago.
At the end of the day we often see Kirk AKA Mountain Monster tailgating in the chair 2 parking lot with his dog. He said Tuesday was Mammoth's best ski day of the past 3 weeks.
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