Judz
New member
With Monday off from school, and an urge to ride some local snow, me and some friends headed up to Baldy. Even though there hasn't been any new snow since the 3 foot dump over 2 weeks ago, i just wasn't in the mood to deal with MLK weekend crowds at mt.high or big bear, and i figured the coverage on thunder would still be decent enought to have some fun.
We arrived in the parking lot around 9:30am and from there could tell that the chair 1 terrain was definitely not still skiable, (never trust the baldy website) but whatever.... its baldy. As we arrived at the notch, we looked over to chair 4, from their it was obvious that turkey shoot was the only run with sufficient coverage, but since the sun hits it first we decided to see how the snow was. Bad call, the snow on chair 4 has been going through a serious melting/refreezing cycle and was pretty icy.
We then headed over to thunder which was of course a much different story. All of the groomers skied pretty well, especially skyline and bonanza. Everything that wasn’t groomed had some extremely variable snow on it. You could be in very strange powder for half a second then on a sheet of giant ice cubes frozen together the next. While parts of thunder still has a decent 2 foot base, there are some bald spots starting to emerge in areas. We skied thunder until eating lunch around 1:00pm, and i had some lovely chicken fingers at the baldy notch. After lunch, we did a half dozen more laps on thunder, followed by a final lap on chair 4, which by that time was nice and soft, (even though you had to weave through rocks towards the bottom.) We downloaded chair 1 at about 3:00 and were on the road by 3 : 30pm.
All things considered, we had a great day at baldy, even though the coverage and conditions were by no means great. Honestly, id rather dodge rocks at baldy any day than dodge people at mtn high or big bear.
Sorry guys, forgot the camera.
We arrived in the parking lot around 9:30am and from there could tell that the chair 1 terrain was definitely not still skiable, (never trust the baldy website) but whatever.... its baldy. As we arrived at the notch, we looked over to chair 4, from their it was obvious that turkey shoot was the only run with sufficient coverage, but since the sun hits it first we decided to see how the snow was. Bad call, the snow on chair 4 has been going through a serious melting/refreezing cycle and was pretty icy.
We then headed over to thunder which was of course a much different story. All of the groomers skied pretty well, especially skyline and bonanza. Everything that wasn’t groomed had some extremely variable snow on it. You could be in very strange powder for half a second then on a sheet of giant ice cubes frozen together the next. While parts of thunder still has a decent 2 foot base, there are some bald spots starting to emerge in areas. We skied thunder until eating lunch around 1:00pm, and i had some lovely chicken fingers at the baldy notch. After lunch, we did a half dozen more laps on thunder, followed by a final lap on chair 4, which by that time was nice and soft, (even though you had to weave through rocks towards the bottom.) We downloaded chair 1 at about 3:00 and were on the road by 3 : 30pm.
All things considered, we had a great day at baldy, even though the coverage and conditions were by no means great. Honestly, id rather dodge rocks at baldy any day than dodge people at mtn high or big bear.
Sorry guys, forgot the camera.
