Day 61: Expectations exceeded.
That was the mantra of the day for Bobby Danger, Telejon, AmyZ and yours truly. Some of the best days happen when you don't have high expectations to begin with and you end up being pleasantly surprised, as was the case today.
It started snowing right around opening and spread a quick schmear of cream cheese across the mountain an inch or two thick, smoothing everything out with moderately dense new snow. Somehow the base beneath wasn't rock hard following last night's refreeze, either, so everything skied incredibly well. On top of the conditions the mountain was absolutely deserted. How deserted? This deserted:
Backside hadn't just opened when that photo was taken, either. It was a full two hours after the mountain opened, and Backside never closed. That's how empty the mountain was today. Nearly every chair coming up Collins had one, two or zero riders on it throughout the morning. Liftlines? There were none. Everything was ski-on. There was absolutely zero competition for untracked snow today.
As those photos from Backside show, the sun came out for a bit mid-morning, quickly dampening the new snow. It stayed reasonably quick, however.
Today was also the last day for Supreme this season, so we had to take a ride to bid the old girl farewell for another winter.
Catherine's Area still held huge tracts of untracked measured in acres rather than in square feet. We headed for a completely untracked Albion Gully. In fact, as the clouds were moving back in we were breaking trail to set the Patsy Marley traverse at 12:30 p.m.!
I was rather tired today, and split at 1:45 p.m. to head home and fall asleep as the others stayed. I'm disappointed, however, that the forecast now indicates that tomorrow's once-monster storm is now forecast to close off (again!) and leave us with 10 inches or so, a far cry from the earlier forecast of 25-38", while it plasters the north slope of the Uintas instead. We'll see, however...things can change back. [-o<
That was the mantra of the day for Bobby Danger, Telejon, AmyZ and yours truly. Some of the best days happen when you don't have high expectations to begin with and you end up being pleasantly surprised, as was the case today.
It started snowing right around opening and spread a quick schmear of cream cheese across the mountain an inch or two thick, smoothing everything out with moderately dense new snow. Somehow the base beneath wasn't rock hard following last night's refreeze, either, so everything skied incredibly well. On top of the conditions the mountain was absolutely deserted. How deserted? This deserted:
Backside hadn't just opened when that photo was taken, either. It was a full two hours after the mountain opened, and Backside never closed. That's how empty the mountain was today. Nearly every chair coming up Collins had one, two or zero riders on it throughout the morning. Liftlines? There were none. Everything was ski-on. There was absolutely zero competition for untracked snow today.
As those photos from Backside show, the sun came out for a bit mid-morning, quickly dampening the new snow. It stayed reasonably quick, however.
Today was also the last day for Supreme this season, so we had to take a ride to bid the old girl farewell for another winter.
Catherine's Area still held huge tracts of untracked measured in acres rather than in square feet. We headed for a completely untracked Albion Gully. In fact, as the clouds were moving back in we were breaking trail to set the Patsy Marley traverse at 12:30 p.m.!
I was rather tired today, and split at 1:45 p.m. to head home and fall asleep as the others stayed. I'm disappointed, however, that the forecast now indicates that tomorrow's once-monster storm is now forecast to close off (again!) and leave us with 10 inches or so, a far cry from the earlier forecast of 25-38", while it plasters the north slope of the Uintas instead. We'll see, however...things can change back. [-o<
