Yet another un-crowded, peaceful day on the mountain today. While the economy continues to struggle, the locals continue to benefit from the lack of crowds on our huge mountain and another great snow year. The 8 inches we got yesterday (on top of the 15 on Monday) were waiting for us this morning and we didn’t even waste the traverse over to Thunderhead. Instead we skied the bottom of the T-Head lift line to cheers from above.

After a quick ride up the lift we were off to Blizzard and the powdery bottom pitch of Norther and on to BC for a fresh look at Sunnyside. While this Hick I know and Flyers Dave snuck into Elkhead trees, I ventured over to the treeline along Sunnyside and down the steep pitch of Elkhorn (I bet a lot of locals don’t even know what that trail is called). Next up was the Wally World Cornice (AKA Black Power) over to Ramrod, which if you don’t know about you really should. And then the trusty South Peak lift gave us a ride up to the top of West Side. Craig’s Ridge was as tasty as ever with huge piles of snow and not tracks at all. After a couple of the old stand by’s we decided to venture to new stashes (at least for me). Kodak was calling Keith’s name so we headed over to Morningside to get some cool pictures in the deep. And DEEP it was! In fact the snow was so nice that we did it twice.

And after pounding out a few more of our favorites, like Billy Kidd Trees and Keith’s ridge we headed to the top for one last top to bottom. Storm Peak Face to Mustache to Sunset to Rudy’s to Vagabond to Lower Concentration to Rough Rider to Beeline and home! A beautiful, cold, blue sky powder day was just what I needed today.

Posted by Powder Hound Thursday, February 12, 2009 0 comments

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!

Posted by Andy Kennedy Monday, February 9, 2009 1 comments

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