I got to ski my birthday for the first time in over 20 years, and on a free ticket from attending the L.A. Ski Show. Summit/Bear have been doing this promo (good through the first half of December) a few years now. In normal years 1/4 to 1/3 of the mountains are open this early, but this year it's more like 3/4 so a good deal.
It's been 12 days since the last storm, but we had a cold week and they made snow close to 24/7 during that time. Summit has one of the most competent snowmakers anywhere, and everything open was packed powder with absolutely none of the hard subsurface you usually get with snowmaking. This will change when we get a weather warmup or holiday traffic, but today it was ego cruising all over the mountain.
After skiing 18K by 1PM I decided to drive over to Bear Mt. for a couple of hours. When Snow Summit bought Bear 2 years ago, they concentrated the park features there. With SoCal's 2/3 proportion of snowboarders this has proved popular, and with more traffic on fewer runs there were many more hardpack spots. And of course it doesn't help when the less competent boarders slide the steeper sections heelside and scrape down the snow.
Weather was freezing or a little below all day, and the afternoon was a bit cold as clouds came in. They also were blowing snow at Bear but not at Summit.
It's been 12 days since the last storm, but we had a cold week and they made snow close to 24/7 during that time. Summit has one of the most competent snowmakers anywhere, and everything open was packed powder with absolutely none of the hard subsurface you usually get with snowmaking. This will change when we get a weather warmup or holiday traffic, but today it was ego cruising all over the mountain.
After skiing 18K by 1PM I decided to drive over to Bear Mt. for a couple of hours. When Snow Summit bought Bear 2 years ago, they concentrated the park features there. With SoCal's 2/3 proportion of snowboarders this has proved popular, and with more traffic on fewer runs there were many more hardpack spots. And of course it doesn't help when the less competent boarders slide the steeper sections heelside and scrape down the snow.
Weather was freezing or a little below all day, and the afternoon was a bit cold as clouds came in. They also were blowing snow at Bear but not at Summit.