It was a beautiful morning to be out in the mountains. It was crystal clear
and a comfortable -4 C when I left the house. It snowed fairly heavily for a
while last evening and although it was quite windy, I was left with delusions
of boot high up on the mountain today. Well reality bites.
If a significant quantity fell up top, it apparently blew off to parts unknown. There was dense blow in between the moguls, but not enough to cover the hardened tops left over from the rain.
Recently groomed runs were pretty nice though and even some surprising spots
like the steep pitch on lower Cedar Center. It had its share of boiler plate
and ice berg tips, but if you got the right line there were some surprisingly
nice turns. The cool part is that on the next run your tracks would be filled
in again by the gusty winds.
Another surprisingly nice spot was the upper part of the Bow trees. Now we aren't talking breath grabbing powder here, but compared to most of the off trail stuff, it was pretty good. I foolishly headed down lower Easter Bowl, where turns alternated between great and awful and found myself in a field of frozen ruts at the top of Freeway. After carefully navigating this, I was surprised to find the steeper and often icy mogul pitch was in fact not too bad as it had enough snow blown in to miss most of crunchies.
This dense wind blown snow should provide for an excellent base if the snow
the ski hill is predicting (20 cm) does in fact arrive tonight.
At 2:00 PM the temperature at the house is 2 C and clouds have replaced the clear skies.
(Click on any picture for a larger version)
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