tseeb
Well-known member
At 5 PM Sat. evening Kirkwood was announcing they would be in full operation. Early on Sun. morning they still said full operation and were guaranteeing no liftlines or traffic on Highway 88 returning to the Valley and Bay Area. At 8:30 AM, they admitted they were having problems with Chairs 1 and 6, 7 and 10. By then, my friend with blacked-out Squaw pass was well on his way to So. Tahoe so we were committed.
We arrived Kirkwood about 9:30 AM and parked far away by squeezing between a Jeep that had parked diagonally and a long truck. Chair 5 was barely moving and no longer loading and there were lines extending out of season pass office and ticket office. They would not give me the 7Wood free buddy ticket on my $299 Snowbomb pass so I used a $58 voucher that I received for Christmas for my friend. They said the ticket would also be good for any day later in the season and we later saw a sign saying it was good for two tickets. I’ll have to ask what they are doing for passholders, especially those who can show tickets from other areas on Jan. 2 when Kirkwood was closed.
The only chair loading was The Reut (Chair 11) so we got in line, which was more than 5 minutes. We traversed left off the top and skied down Shotgun to where we could see chair 2 base. The chair was running, but not loading. When we got closer, we could see a closed sign. Ski patrol said it was open so we skied pass the sign and were the first to load. We found untracked on the Thunder Saddle side of the chair that we skied all morning. Sometimes it was very good, often it was low angle and sun or wind-affected. We hiked up a little higher once, but found the snow was not worth the hike. The liftline was only bad once and it went down as lunchtime approached. We took very lightly tracked High Whiskey back to the base where we had my son move the chair closer into a empty slot.
After lunch at the car, where we all left some clothes, we returned to The Reut. The line was mostly gone and we found good snow in the gully, on the ridge above the gully and on the edges and between runs below and to skiers right of the chair. The vertical is less than 900 feet and the lift is slow, but we were having fun and there is a lot of variety. We were on the lift for the 8th time after lunch and thinking about taking a final ride on Solitude for a change when my son called and said the snow was great on Cornice, which we had not noticed had started running. We went over there and found my son and all went left along the top of the Cornice. The first spot I looked at to drop in did not look that great and would have been hard for my son on a board to get to so we went down to the low spot on the cornice where I was the first one to drop in on Friday. It looked a lot worse with rocks below and some narrow spots and a girl frozen in the one good path. Once she moved out of the way I could see the line was not bad and found snow was soft enough to easily hold an edge. We skied mostly untracked to the bottom and got on Cornice again. It stopped for almost 10 minutes about halfway up and we could see Solitude was also stopped. After one false start, it got us to the top after 4 pm where I led us down a route that I liked, but my son and friend thought was too bumped out. 20 runs/15,850 vertical
We arrived Kirkwood about 9:30 AM and parked far away by squeezing between a Jeep that had parked diagonally and a long truck. Chair 5 was barely moving and no longer loading and there were lines extending out of season pass office and ticket office. They would not give me the 7Wood free buddy ticket on my $299 Snowbomb pass so I used a $58 voucher that I received for Christmas for my friend. They said the ticket would also be good for any day later in the season and we later saw a sign saying it was good for two tickets. I’ll have to ask what they are doing for passholders, especially those who can show tickets from other areas on Jan. 2 when Kirkwood was closed.
The only chair loading was The Reut (Chair 11) so we got in line, which was more than 5 minutes. We traversed left off the top and skied down Shotgun to where we could see chair 2 base. The chair was running, but not loading. When we got closer, we could see a closed sign. Ski patrol said it was open so we skied pass the sign and were the first to load. We found untracked on the Thunder Saddle side of the chair that we skied all morning. Sometimes it was very good, often it was low angle and sun or wind-affected. We hiked up a little higher once, but found the snow was not worth the hike. The liftline was only bad once and it went down as lunchtime approached. We took very lightly tracked High Whiskey back to the base where we had my son move the chair closer into a empty slot.
After lunch at the car, where we all left some clothes, we returned to The Reut. The line was mostly gone and we found good snow in the gully, on the ridge above the gully and on the edges and between runs below and to skiers right of the chair. The vertical is less than 900 feet and the lift is slow, but we were having fun and there is a lot of variety. We were on the lift for the 8th time after lunch and thinking about taking a final ride on Solitude for a change when my son called and said the snow was great on Cornice, which we had not noticed had started running. We went over there and found my son and all went left along the top of the Cornice. The first spot I looked at to drop in did not look that great and would have been hard for my son on a board to get to so we went down to the low spot on the cornice where I was the first one to drop in on Friday. It looked a lot worse with rocks below and some narrow spots and a girl frozen in the one good path. Once she moved out of the way I could see the line was not bad and found snow was soft enough to easily hold an edge. We skied mostly untracked to the bottom and got on Cornice again. It stopped for almost 10 minutes about halfway up and we could see Solitude was also stopped. After one false start, it got us to the top after 4 pm where I led us down a route that I liked, but my son and friend thought was too bumped out. 20 runs/15,850 vertical
