Day 92: Mayuary
We coined a new term today: Mayuary. That describes the kind of snow and conditions we've been experiencing in May this year. :wink: With any luck it'll be followed by Juneuary. While folks elsewhere are preparing for their Memorial Day BBQs at the lake or heading to the beach, this is what we were doing this morning:
It snowed last night. Just 2 inches but it was dense yet fluffy all at the same time, and it stuck like glue to the smooth subsurface. As a result we weren't even punching through to the base on the moderately angled stuff, we were legitimately skiing powder. On Memorial Day weekend. And I don't know if it's due to the holiday weekend or just local burnout but today was nearly as empty as yesterday was.
It was the Four Amigos today: Bobby Danger, skidog, Telejon and yours truly. It's kinda creepy when you pull into the Bypass Road lot 20 minutes before opening and you're the very first car there. It's kinda creepy, too, seeing Bobby like this before I've had sufficient coffee:
We were on the second chair of the day up Peruvian and the first ones through the tunnel into Mineral with no one else even immediately behind us.
We struck out across the slope to Chamonix 1 and on to Ski Patrol Gully, one of the runs Powderqueen and I frequented yesterday. It was delightful, amazing, smooth and downright fluffy. On May 28th!
For our second run we headed straight into Alta^h^h^h^h, err...I mean "Snowbird East," hiking up to the High Baldy Traverse and through the Armpit gate.
Untracked bliss down a full length Tombstone and effortless skiing down Taint to the Angle Station before returning to Snowbird via the Blackjack traverse.
We hit another Ski Patrol Gully in Mineral with still no other tracks than our own from earlier.
We then moved to the front side, the first ones out to the Bass Benches. Regular pairs of hikers were heading up the Twins to ski Pipeline and 13 Turns. A bunch of U.S. Ski Team hopefuls were training on a seeded bump line beneath the lowest section of the Little Cloud chair. However no one...and I mean no one...had skied Puckerbrush yet when we hit it around 10 a.m. There were no tracks at all through the gate into the Gad Chutes even at 10:30 a.m., a full 2.5 hours after opening.
My quads were hurting from yesterday, so I finished up with a Shot 5 Route 1 to wrap up my day while the others soldiered on. I had to keep some gas in the tank because with a more potent storm system moving in tomorrow could be even deeper. \
/
Skidog was taking action shots with his new Nikon DSLR, so those should be added to this topic a bit later on today.
We coined a new term today: Mayuary. That describes the kind of snow and conditions we've been experiencing in May this year. :wink: With any luck it'll be followed by Juneuary. While folks elsewhere are preparing for their Memorial Day BBQs at the lake or heading to the beach, this is what we were doing this morning:
It snowed last night. Just 2 inches but it was dense yet fluffy all at the same time, and it stuck like glue to the smooth subsurface. As a result we weren't even punching through to the base on the moderately angled stuff, we were legitimately skiing powder. On Memorial Day weekend. And I don't know if it's due to the holiday weekend or just local burnout but today was nearly as empty as yesterday was.
It was the Four Amigos today: Bobby Danger, skidog, Telejon and yours truly. It's kinda creepy when you pull into the Bypass Road lot 20 minutes before opening and you're the very first car there. It's kinda creepy, too, seeing Bobby like this before I've had sufficient coffee:
We were on the second chair of the day up Peruvian and the first ones through the tunnel into Mineral with no one else even immediately behind us.
We struck out across the slope to Chamonix 1 and on to Ski Patrol Gully, one of the runs Powderqueen and I frequented yesterday. It was delightful, amazing, smooth and downright fluffy. On May 28th!
For our second run we headed straight into Alta^h^h^h^h, err...I mean "Snowbird East," hiking up to the High Baldy Traverse and through the Armpit gate.
Untracked bliss down a full length Tombstone and effortless skiing down Taint to the Angle Station before returning to Snowbird via the Blackjack traverse.
We hit another Ski Patrol Gully in Mineral with still no other tracks than our own from earlier.
We then moved to the front side, the first ones out to the Bass Benches. Regular pairs of hikers were heading up the Twins to ski Pipeline and 13 Turns. A bunch of U.S. Ski Team hopefuls were training on a seeded bump line beneath the lowest section of the Little Cloud chair. However no one...and I mean no one...had skied Puckerbrush yet when we hit it around 10 a.m. There were no tracks at all through the gate into the Gad Chutes even at 10:30 a.m., a full 2.5 hours after opening.
My quads were hurting from yesterday, so I finished up with a Shot 5 Route 1 to wrap up my day while the others soldiered on. I had to keep some gas in the tank because with a more potent storm system moving in tomorrow could be even deeper. \
/Skidog was taking action shots with his new Nikon DSLR, so those should be added to this topic a bit later on today.
