Matt Duffy
New member
<I>(Note from the Administrator: This report was originally posted on 2/7/00. Due to our move to new servers, the date and time attributed to this post is incorrect.)</I> <BR> <BR> It's been one of the best weeks of my life. Let's see, lemme count. 1 2 3 4 5 6 SEVEN days in a row of POWDER. INTENSE F'ING POWDER. Add one today to make it up there 8 of 11 days. Smuggs has been NUKED. Radioactive white fallout is widespread and coming in _tidal_ _waves_. How many storms? I've lost track. It gets deeper and deeper and deeper. Today I was skiing through ultra light drifts that were UP TO MY SHOULDERS! 3 friends & I had just eaten our lunch and gone outside with a plan to hike Madonna. M1 has been on wind hold for the last two days. Last night, Smuggs got BOMBED again, with an under-reported 8 inches. I don't know where or when they took that measurement, but double it. Several times in the woods, I probed. Jimski reported that the snow last Wednesday was well above the grips of his 52" poles. Well now I can stick my pole down through some untracked (which is EVERYWHERE) and get almost up to my SHOULDER. Then I fall and flounder while fighting to get up from my probing excursions. <BR> <BR>So anyways, we were getting ready to head over to Sterling and hike Madonna from the top of the Sterling Lift. Well guess what my friends, the clouds had disapeared and the sun beat down brightly on Madonna Peak, with a deep blue backdrop of a sky. The winds had subsided and yup, they fired up M1. We were among the first of a mass of hungry wolf packs that horded above the rope above the M1 Lift area. The rope was dropped and there was a free-for-all. We fought hard and aggressively, boarding the FOURTH chair. We got knee deep first tracks in THE LIFT CORRAL! We were THE FIRST to pluck the _ripe_ FIS woods- it was just bursting out at the seams with light puhh POWDER SNOW UP TO OUR PECTORALS!!! There were HUGE drifts in there that were just obscene. I went over that icefall with so much speed that when I FINALLY landed (YEAH!!!!), my momentum threw me forward into a complete sommersault in snow so deep my skis remained on my feet as I never touched anything but helium powder and I was able to keep speeeeeeed through it and _ski out of it_ and keep going with it! <BR> <BR>More to come, excuse me while I REVEL!!!!!!