That
sounds like the description for some sort of confection, but it pretty much
sums up the conditions today. It was sunny on and off most of the day,
although I managed to cunningly avoid that in my picture taking. The
Face Lift was making a rare appearance in the open column and flight school
was in for a gaggle of boarders launching their apparently resilient bodies
off of Great Canadian.
The black dot in this picture is a boarder getting enough air that you could have comfortably driven a semi under him. I tried to get him inverted, but missed. I also considered going down to the jump to get some decent pictures of our one winged friends, but I am afrid I am not nearly dedicated enough to photography or these reports to trade some good turns for a mere picture.
The snow up here was soft, pleasant and boot deep, but fairly well tracked. Down
farther most stuff was mogulled, but the moguls were also soft and pretty friendly until
you got to the crunch line. This ran about the top of China Wall in Lizard and
around the top of the Cruiser cat track in Cedar. Everything above this including
Sunny Side and upper Cedar Ridge was quite nice. Below, not so.
The
smart way to ski Snake Ridge would have been down Snake Main and then out across
the top of the KC Chutes to the safety of the groomed stuff. So I decided to
ski Red Tree.
I stopped at the top to take this shot of Cedar Ridge, which sure seems a lot bigger
when you are skiing it than it looks from here. Because Red Tree itself had lots of
moguls I ended up skiing along the top of Steep and Deep and down Glades. The top part was
nice, but the ice, frozen crust and ruts of Glades proved a challenge that was only met by
turning the survival knob to 10 and the style knob to 0. Definitely not recommended.
When I exited down Holo Hike I discovered great sheets of bullet proof boiler plate. For now there was enough scattered loose stuff to at least manage, but Elk appeared to have been more recently groomed and more hospitable.
At quarter to five it is -1C under mainly clear, calm skies.
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