February 12, 2000

Underwhelmed

Our picky family group didn't exhibit much enthusiasm for the conditions this morning. True, at least some of the groomed runs on the upper mountain were excellent, damn near perfect in fact, except for the knowledge of what lay below. Nice if you like cruising I guess, but the soft snow off trail has continued to degrade and would now qualify for my crud designation. There were some decent soft turns, but in most places the snow was quite stiff and usually lumpily chopped. Other than a slight visual similarity, it was a far cry from the glorious delights of true powder.

Down below last week's rain line, ice was still king, although on some of the freshly groomed runs it had been recycled into stuff that provided a surprising amount of grip. There was plenty of boiler plate for any that wanted to hone their edging skills though and some runs provided frozen lumps for those who felt their knees could use some loosening. There were even some scraped off sections at the top of Tom's run in Currie. Finally, the sunshine that helped cheer things up yesterday was absent today.

By noon the consensus was that the afternoon could be better spent in couch potato training and we headed home, leaving only our eight year old marooned in her ski club to carry on. While I guess objectively the conditions were okay and I am sure many folks had a great day, we apparently weren't the only ones who were less than impressed. When we stopped for milk at the Pantry, it appeared that the woman in front of us was renting a movie for a group of visitors that had given up on skiing for the day. At least we weren't on vacation.

I want to apologize to the groups who were watching for me, particularly the folks that I had told that I might be found at Gabriella's about one. By then we were already cozily back in our house.

For reasons that mystify me, I get many requests each week from people who want to meet me and ski a few runs or have their pictures in my ski report. I am a startlingly dull fellow that certainly doesn't merit this attention and while I initially tried to make meeting arrangements, it just didn't work out. One of the advantages of living on the mountain is that I don't plan when I will ski, but just come and go as whim takes me. Set meetings turned out to be very inconvenient and required more forethought than I really wanted to invest, particularly when the folks often would or could not show up for some reason. What's more the volume of these has risen to the point where I would be spending all of my time going from meeting to meeting, so I am usually forced to decline these offers, although I am certainly flattered by them.

At 3:10 PM it is-5 C at the house and cloudy.