Our original plan for this week targeted Lost Trail for Thursday as it is closed Monday-Wednesday. However the last meaningful snow in the region was last Friday and this week was forecast sunny from Wednesday onwards. So I changed plan and opted for Montana Snowbowl on that first sunny day, hoping for good spring snow in its 2,600 vertical front side bowl. The weather forecast was accurate, resulting in SE faces softening by noon and other frontside by 2PM.
The Snow Park lift is new since 2012, mostly intermediate but low and WSW facing. Here’s why it’s called TV Mountain.
After skiing the Sunset Strip and Evergreen Forest we returned to the base on the Second Thought cat track and Sunrise Bowl. The latter was in prime corn mode so we tried the similarly exposed 2,000 vertical Grizzly run which I remembered from late morning on my 2012 visit.
However, leftover chunks from old powder softened slower, so we needed to stick to skier packed lines, unlike 2012 when the overall surfaces were smoother.
Next time up we went to the Lavelle lift, which faces WNW and still had some winter snow. View north from top of Lavelle:
We skied the High Park and Hot Fudge groomers before our first venture into the front side bowl. East Bowl was the most popular and starts out mellow.
But it soon rolls over to a steeper pitch here:
We followed the majority of ski tracks traversing left from that pitch to Chicken Chute.
Overview of East Bowl (upper left) and Chicken Chute (center) from Grizzly chair:
View of Lavelle lift from Nutcracker, which we skied next:
Then we skied the long Paradise groomer from top to bottom. View of Sunrise Bowl (left) and Grizzly (upper right) from lower Paradise:
Every time we had been on the Grizzly lift, the only frontside skiers visible were on East Bowl (center of pic below).
Finally at 2:30 we saw skiers in West Bowl (upper left).
So we decided to follow suit.
Lower down we caught upto a local family.
The little girl skiing West Bowl was all of 5 years old!
For our final lap we skied Mid Nut from Lavelle and finished with Longhorn.
We skied until 3:45 (23,700 vertical), drove to Philipsburg and stayed at the historic Kaiser Hotel. All the restaurants in town were closed Mon-Wed so we had dinner out on the road at Sunshine Station, barely getting in there before 7PM closing. I knew that many Montana ski areas run only 4-5 days per week, but that applies to some hotels and restaurants too.
The Snow Park lift is new since 2012, mostly intermediate but low and WSW facing. Here’s why it’s called TV Mountain.
After skiing the Sunset Strip and Evergreen Forest we returned to the base on the Second Thought cat track and Sunrise Bowl. The latter was in prime corn mode so we tried the similarly exposed 2,000 vertical Grizzly run which I remembered from late morning on my 2012 visit.
However, leftover chunks from old powder softened slower, so we needed to stick to skier packed lines, unlike 2012 when the overall surfaces were smoother.
Next time up we went to the Lavelle lift, which faces WNW and still had some winter snow. View north from top of Lavelle:
We skied the High Park and Hot Fudge groomers before our first venture into the front side bowl. East Bowl was the most popular and starts out mellow.
But it soon rolls over to a steeper pitch here:
We followed the majority of ski tracks traversing left from that pitch to Chicken Chute.
Overview of East Bowl (upper left) and Chicken Chute (center) from Grizzly chair:
View of Lavelle lift from Nutcracker, which we skied next:
Then we skied the long Paradise groomer from top to bottom. View of Sunrise Bowl (left) and Grizzly (upper right) from lower Paradise:
Every time we had been on the Grizzly lift, the only frontside skiers visible were on East Bowl (center of pic below).
Finally at 2:30 we saw skiers in West Bowl (upper left).
So we decided to follow suit.
Lower down we caught upto a local family.
The little girl skiing West Bowl was all of 5 years old!
For our final lap we skied Mid Nut from Lavelle and finished with Longhorn.
We skied until 3:45 (23,700 vertical), drove to Philipsburg and stayed at the historic Kaiser Hotel. All the restaurants in town were closed Mon-Wed so we had dinner out on the road at Sunshine Station, barely getting in there before 7PM closing. I knew that many Montana ski areas run only 4-5 days per week, but that applies to some hotels and restaurants too.
