IN THE DEEP

Perish the thought, but we slept in. We're not total slackers, we called the snow report at 6am and heard "4 new inches since the mountain closed... NOT currently snowing." To me that meant dust-on-crust, and a Monday in the office. When we actually made it to the living room however and looked at the deck, the house was in full-blown emergency... nearly a FOOT was on the deck, how the hell can that be?? We made it to the hill by 9 in record time, and one look at Concie below us on T-head was enough to make us wonder... someone had either made a mistake, or we'd gotten nearly a foot of snow in 2 hours.

It was the latter.

After turns through knee-deep piles on Blizzard, we headed for the top- a brave trek across the gusty, windblown Face to get to an epic run down Sunset to Moonlight trees. The snow is not only deep, it's light. Again, we were in shock- yesterday's 40 degree temps seemed to blow out with the sunny skies, it's about 20 up there with a foot of fresh! We went from the most perfect weather for the Winter Carnival I've ever seen to one of the best powder days of the year... it was RAINING when we came home from the movies last night- go figure!

Mind you, when scraped off in spots (lower High Noon, say) there was indeed some *cccrrrrrhh* sounds beneath us. But if you stayed in the trees, hunting for the goods, you had no problem finding them. You know where that is... we'll selfishly keep our secret stashes to ourselves today, we earned them.

In addition to the surprising conditions, also odd were the pockets of people. For instance, Rudy's was littered with timid skiers going around the push piles. Yet we saw not a soul on Storm Face and Sunset. Even upper High Noon was void when we were there, yet after a lap up Sundown there were hundreds at the top, just stagnant; as if waiting for each other.

To avoid the groups going down from there, we took another lap down Sideburn, and I saw one person between there and Rainbow to Hurricane. Some phenomenon I can't explain was keeping the groups together enough that there were wide open powder turns down Hurricane still at 11:30. We caught our last turns down Concentration finally, making a last minute lap up Thunderhead again to earn them, and well worth the wait. Up to our knees yet again.

This beats out all the jealousy I had over the weekend for our pal Jake who was storm chasing in the south, the Champagne has returned!!

-See you in the Deep!