Snowbird, March 9-10, 2010

I tagged along with our younger Iron Blosam group Tuesday: hotshots Mark, Eddie and Amy, and also Diana, her younger sister Elena and Elena's friend Rebecca. This was the last day for the latter 2, so they were being pushed a little skiing with the rest of us. Rebecca had skied with me on the storm day last year and has a gung-ho attitude. She had a cast on one wrist from hyperextending a thumb at Bear Valley 2 weeks earlier, but that was not slowing her down.

Weather was not the greatest, a bit of snow earlier, mostly overcast with some fog, then it started snowing steadily about 2PM. We started down Upper Silver Fox, which was pleasantly smooth with few bumps. I led some of the group skier's left into the soft snow under the not yet filled in part of North Chute. Down lower we hit the trees skier's right of Dalton's, which were nearly as mogulled as the open part.

We moved over to the Gad side, eventually hitting Tigertail. Here's Eddie dropping into one of the tighter slots there:


After lunch the kids wanted to return to Tigertail, so I decided to leave them and conserve energy for the likely powder on Wednesday.

Tuesday it snowed from 2-9PM, totalling about 8 inches including a bit from the morning. It skied a little better than that considering not all of Friday's bigger dump was packed out.

Adam arrived Tuesday night, and he set off early with Eddie, Mark and Ben, ended up in the 3rd tram. I was lazy and walked down to Wilbere, which used to open at 8:45 but now opens at 9 with most of the other lifts. I knew the tram line would be a zoo so I went up Peruvian and into Mineral Basin. I had 4 early runs there, similar to a bigger powder day 4 years ago. The new Head Jimi skis were a big help as there was some bottoming out on variable subsurfaces with this more modest storm.

Then down from the top via Great Scott and deeper powder in the apron of the Upper Cirque. Back up Peruvian into Mineral and then over to Little Cloud Bowl, which had looked foggy earlier. In the rush to get out early I had cleverly forgotten my goggles, so I tried to avoid the variable fog patches. The fog returned to Little Cloud so I made one last Mineral run, this time up the first part of Hillary Step to access less tracked snow.


With visibility returning to Little Cloud I made 2 Rasta runs from the higher traverse before going into mid-Gad for lunch. I ran into Al there, so we skied together after lunch. Back to Little Cloud/Rasta, then next run the long traverse out to Nirvana/Restaurant Roll area. We had a decent line of lightly tracked snow, which Al is skiing here:

It led to a choke point of thick trees between 2 rocky areas. Eventually we ended up in the lowest part of the South Chute/Wilbere Bowl area, which was mostly tracked by then. We finished with a tram, where I went through the Upper Cirque in still decent powder.

Total for the day was 24,600 with 10K of powder. The deeper day 4 years ago was 15K of powder.