Well, here's the Baldy TR for 3/11/08:
Decided after all that hesitation to just hit it up-> figured they couldn't be lying about the Chair 1 runs being open, even if they were sketchy, and that without a significant wind event in the mix that the warming ought to be good for some cornage. This was pretty close to the mark.
Pulled up to the parking lot and was pretty dismayed at what awaited- it all looked very burned out, and there was just a very thin track of brown snow leading down to the bottom of the chair. Yikes. Holcumac was gone, as was any semblance of snow on skier's right of the canyon. Up we went without boards on our feet- my buddy was pretty obviously wondering what I was smoking when suggesting we ride here.
Coming up the chair, was happy to see that Morgan's/Bentley's was fully covered, though I knew I'd have to hit that alone on the last run of the day.
We got to the Notch and my friend breathed a sigh of relief that indeed there was a lot of snow up there, at least on Thunder. I figured we'd go check out Chair 4 first, since it'd become slop pretty quick, and to get a bearing on how my boy could ride. Roller Coaster was closed, so we hit Turkey Shoot a couple times, good warmup runs, and he seemed he could hang, so we headed to Thunder, where we stayed for the rest of the day. In the AM Bonanza was the call- things were still a little hard, but by 11/11:30 or so the north side of Goldridge softened up enough to go exploring-> not classic fun corn, but soft and very carveable.
A chicken sandwich and a couple beers later, went back over to Thunder, hit north side of Goldridge a couple more times, then the north side of the ridge under the Chair 3 line into Robins, which was pretty soft and plenty fun. Emile's was OK, not that great, pretty hard still. South Bowl remains closed. Eventually we figured we'd beat traffic and took off around 2:30.
My friend went down to Chair 1 to download, and I had to go hiking down from the top of 2 to the fire road to Morgan's/Bentley's. Stepped in and rode the road down a ways, which was burned out in a spot and had to be walked across. The run itself was well-covered and soft, a good, very fun last run of the day. The runout to the lot was as sketchy as it looked when we first pulled up, but was makeable. It won't be for much longer, maybe another couple days max, and hiking out to the bottom will be necessary. Left the lot at 3 and was home in Westwood at 4, after a great day of SoCal Spring at Baldy.
