It’s back to earth after last week’s Big Sky trip, but great early spring conditions at Gore over the weekend at least softened the landing. Several inches of new snow Thursday night, followed by bright, cobalt blue skies and temperatures in the 40s produced ideal snow conditions on Saturday. While the sun softened the trails into hero corn, the woods and north-facing exposures stayed relatively dry and almost powdery.
The only thing lacking for a perfect day of spring skiing was Beth, who had to stay behind for a commitment with the Children’s Museum at Saratoga. Daniel and I headed up top, and with snow conditions being so nice we made a point of hitting some of the trails that we don’t ski all that often, like Upper Darby and Double Barrel.
Rumor and Lies were both soft top-to-bottom, with plenty of skiers bombing over the Rumor headwall. Lies was our on-piste pick of the day: smooth corn snow that begged to be skied fast.
Just about all of the glades that we skied held nice snow. At one point we ventured into one of the south-facing aspects (Cave maybe?) and found the snow there to be a bit manky, but everything else skied extremely well. North-facing glades like the Darkside Glade had mostly packed powder conditions with the trees still coated in snow from Thursday night’s storm. Any of the off-the-beaten path woods in that vicinity were simply great.
During the afternoon we skied lower mountain trails with Sylvie. It was one of those Spring days where it felt nicer to ride the high-speed triple chair than the enclosed gondola. Sleighride, Wild Air and Sunway seemed to stay in nice condition – corn, not slush – right to the end of the day. Even the lower mountain glades that we popped in (Otter Slide, Chatterbox) still had good coverage. I’d expect that by the end of the day Sunday those glades may be getting thin though.
Let’s hope this is the first weekend of a long spring season. We got robbed last year when the season ended abruptly in mid-March.
I was going to use the word "manky" to describe the snow on an off-piste run in my blog report for the weekend, but decided it was too obscure a word. But, practically nobody reads my blog anyway, so I could probably invent words all the time with no repercussions.
ReplyDeleteI guess it's not just the Eskimos who have a thousand words for "snow."
DeleteSkiing doesnt get much better than that - a huge dump of fresh snow and a clear, bright blue sunny sky!
ReplyDelete