April 05, 2000Nasty'Twas a dark and stormy evening, with lots of rain, more wind and the first thunder and lightning of the spring. This morning looked promising though, as there was some white on the trees up on the mountain and it appeared the sun was on its way out. Alas reality bites, or at least it did this morning. There was new snow on top all right, but it was thin and and only partially covered the icy main course. Off of the top of Bear, there were some nice turns in the new heavy crud, but each these was paid for by an abundance of bouncing and scraping. Moguls were particularly nasty with icy tops sticking out from troughs masked by grabby sludge. The lower part of North Ridge was pretty decent though, with nice cruising in softening groomed corn. However this was not universal on the lower runs, for where they had not been groomed after the snow, one had to navigate some pretty heavy chopped crud. It was only a couple of centimeters deep and below the top of Elk there was no ice, but I would think it would still be a challenge for beginners and intermediates. After a run through Cedar and then back out I was pretty much ready to call it a day, but talked myself into checking out White Pass as it is significantly higher than Bear (the Face Lift was not running when I was there). Unfortunately the icy mogul tops still stuck through the snow even up there, but the snow was deeper and kinder and some pretty nice turns were possible, although scraping sounds were never far away. Things got uglier as you descended of course and the gully and its icy moguls partially obscured by heavy junk were particularly evil. I considered it a good run simply by virtue of exiting with both fibulas and tibias intact. The sun vanished as soon as I got on the mountain and in fact it snowed fairly
heavily on occasion. At two o'clock it is 3 C at the house, cloudy and still
snowing on and off. |
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