Craig's Report - April 15, 1999

Three Days to Go

(Mammoth Head from top of Siberia Ridge)

It was an instant repeat of yesterday's conditions today. Brilliant sunshine, warm temperatures and friendly snow, at least on the sunny slopes. That is where I stayed and in fact sampled the sunny side of all five ridges. I heard from others that there was some good shade skiing, but I didn't try it myself.

(Ski track artistry under the Timber Chair)

Everything was once again soft without being overly mushy. The Siberia bowl trees were somewhat gooey, presumably because the snow there had seen little traffic, but even there the underlying snow wasn't at all rotten. At higher elevations I often encountered frozen lumps sitting on the snow. These were presumably debris from yesterdays skiing and didn't really cause any problems other than the suckers could hurt when they flew up and crashed into your shins.

(Alder grove beside China Wall)

One was also wise to watch for shadows as the snow was invariably much harder anywhere out of the direct sunshine. On one lower run, Silver Lining I think, thin tree shadows were creeping across the run and these formed almost a corduroy of hard spots. You could definitely feel each foot wide shadow as you crossed it.

(Top of Timber Lift with Timber Bowl in background)

I finally spotted a couple of small bare spots down near the bottom of Incline, but otherwise the runs have survived the warm temperatures remarkably well. If the weather continues like this, things will probably start to deteriorate near the base, but with only three days of operation left it isn't going to be a problem.

There is still a ton of snow on the upper slopes, but things are starting to crawl back out of the snow. One should not continue to count on last months holes still being clear. :-)

(A big hunk o snow)

With this picture I tried, rather unsuccessfully, to capture how enormous the cornice at the top of Timber Bowl is. You might note that the couple of tiny dots on the traverse below the rock band at the top of Currie bowl are in fact people.

I got rather carried away with taking pictures today, so for anyone interested I have a second page of pictures.

Before the clock runs out on the season, I also have to give my eleven year old son's summer business a plug. If you are one of the folks having something built on the hill this summer, don't live locally and want to watch the progress of your construction, then the WebKid is the ticket for you. What he does is take pictures of his client's construction sites and posts them on a web page. This can be daily (work days) or weekly or what ever. Best of all he is cheap. <g> Check out his WebKid site for rates. Okay parental duty is now complete. <g>

At 7:15 P.M. it is still 10 C on the porch and sunny in a sun setting fashion.

(Click on any picture for a larger version)