Craig's Report - March 03, 2008

Winter Reprise

For three long weeks there has been barely a flake and our strange February spring sun and warm temperatures have made it hard for me to keep an interest in sliding. Indeed a nasty cold and a heavy case of apathy has kept me off the slopes most of the last week and my first thoughts when I saw snow starting to accumulate were gloomy ones of snow blowers and shovels, rather than skis. I did head out though and while it isn't clear that powder is all that effective against colds, it definitely helps with apathy.

The skiing was far from being universally stellar and indeed some places were pretty horrible, with icy moguls invisibly mixed with holes full of dense powder. These encouraged me to pretty much stick to the North facing slopes, which also seemed to benefit from wind direction. Even there, there wasn't yet enough new snow on steeper slopes to keep you up off of the frozen remnants of those warm days, although upper Cedar Ridge did come pretty close. Moderately pitched sheltered areas seemed the best bets as were some gullies and these areas, which were plentiful, could be absolutely delightful.

The new snow was fairly dense, but still in the creamy powder range and very nice to ski. What's more it was falling hard enough that it seemed to provide a noticeable improvement from run to run.

At 17:00 it is -2 C at the house and still snowing moderately hard.


My warm up run down China Wall presented an ugly mix of iceberg moguls and troughs of dense powder, leavened by bad visibility.

The gentle trees below Cedar Ridge seemed like a better bet and indeed was quite nice as was the tuck out gully.

Looking down Boomerang from the chair. The Bear Chutes on the right had lots of snow, but not quite enough to keep you up off the crunchies.

The upper part of Cedar Ridge was quite nice, but things got clattery farther down. Still not bad though.

The trees between Down Right and 123 were delightful enough that I had to make another loop to sample them again. The visibility in the upper bowl was not great and 123 provided invisible ice lumps and sudden drops that were unsettling. Downright was a better choice.