February 21, 2001

Rumours of a long spring season are baseless

The sun and warm temperatures have come out to play the last couple of days and the changes they have wrought on the hill since Monday's mini dump are rather disquieting. To my surprise substantial areas of Bear were sporting brown snow this afternoon and Wallaby was just awful. Indeed based on yesterday's experiences I chose to use View Trail as an escape route from the top of the Haul Back and a glance up Wallaby was enough to confirm my fears. Upper Dipsy was once again all but unskiable and upper Lizard was uniformly light brown. The hard reality is that with such a thin snow pack the hill really cannot sustain any prolonged spring conditions.

There is hope in that March often brings significant snowfall and the Morrisey snow pillow data shows that the snow pack normally continues to build during that month. However that same data shows this year with half the snow pack of any other year in the last fifteen and it is hard to maintain the hope that things will shortly return to anything like normal. I have heard rumours of pools starting on when the hill will have to close and I am guessing dates in April are not being snapped up.

Away from those sun damaged spots, the skiing was a mixed bag today. On the shady sides of the ridges the snow remained quite nice and while well packed in most places, there were still some soft turns to be found. The 123s were particularly good, while Cedar Ridge had a mix of soft and hard turns. Lower Cedar Center looked ugly by the way.

I tried a run down Tom's run around noon and found a mix of crunchy stuff left over from yesterday's sun, some hard spots and even a couple of bare spots. It probably wasn't as bad as that makes it sound and mediocre might be a better summary. Farther down the snow was soft and heavy and some of the recently buried rocks were reappearing.

Once into snow making territory, the coverage and snow was both fine and while sometimes firm, it was still easy enough to edge.

Just before six it is still 2 C on the porch with a partially cloudy sky.