At this prime time of year Chugach Powder Guides heliskiing is fully booked for Sunday-Saturday and Monday-Friday packages. Thus the only single day reservations I could make were for Saturday/Sunday, with standby for the midweek days. Standby has practically no chance early in the week, but spots can open up later if people get burned out or overrun their vertical and don't want to spend more. So the good news was that I got a standby call Friday. But it snowed 7 inches overnight and was still going strong when the mountain opened at 10:30. In this situation CPG has you check every 2 hours, and since it snowed until 4PM they never got the heli out.
CPG recommended that I ski Alyeska with some of the guides, and for my first day there with powder conditions that turned out to be a great idea. The first run with them was into constricted Christmas Chute, followed by a traverse over cliffs to an open face of 30 degree powder. The snow was dense enough to avoid bottoming out and provided enough resistance for comfortable skiing at that pitch. All of this was at quite a brisk pace to keep up with the guides. I skied 7 powder runs on the 2000+ foot North Face, 3 of them with the guides. I decided in the interest of conserving energy to quit at 3:30 though the mountain is open until 5:30. Alyeska made a very favorable first impression, with 24,600, 11K of powder, quite comparable to President's Day at Solitude.
Adam arrived late Friday night, and since his ski bag didn't make the connection in SLC he got to bed at 2:30AM. Saturday was our first reserved heli day, but it snowed intermittently and once again the heli did not get out. Far skier's right of the North Face still had unconsolidated powder, and the high traverse on Alyeska's front side opened after being closed Friday. So we got 4 runs of fresh on the 500-800 vertical intermediate pitched bowl below the traverse. Once again we quit early, but still a respectable 19,300 vertical with 6K of powder.
CPG recommended that I ski Alyeska with some of the guides, and for my first day there with powder conditions that turned out to be a great idea. The first run with them was into constricted Christmas Chute, followed by a traverse over cliffs to an open face of 30 degree powder. The snow was dense enough to avoid bottoming out and provided enough resistance for comfortable skiing at that pitch. All of this was at quite a brisk pace to keep up with the guides. I skied 7 powder runs on the 2000+ foot North Face, 3 of them with the guides. I decided in the interest of conserving energy to quit at 3:30 though the mountain is open until 5:30. Alyeska made a very favorable first impression, with 24,600, 11K of powder, quite comparable to President's Day at Solitude.
Adam arrived late Friday night, and since his ski bag didn't make the connection in SLC he got to bed at 2:30AM. Saturday was our first reserved heli day, but it snowed intermittently and once again the heli did not get out. Far skier's right of the North Face still had unconsolidated powder, and the high traverse on Alyeska's front side opened after being closed Friday. So we got 4 runs of fresh on the 500-800 vertical intermediate pitched bowl below the traverse. Once again we quit early, but still a respectable 19,300 vertical with 6K of powder.
