Marc's Public Blog

Saturday ended up being downgraded from a foot of snow to none at all, so it was a good idea to be at Heavenly as we got to enjoy the lake views and rode in pretty good weather. I still hate heavenly for all its flat (or uphill) spots, but a couple of rides in Mott Canyon were decent, and the later part of the day, rides from sky express dropping in random places from the traverse to Nevada, were actually pretty good.

Looks like I had a bit too much fun with my board last time

Sunday morning was disappointing because we had gotten 0 snow still, but we headed to kirkwood, as planned. The first rides were a bit crunchy and whatever powder was left has a crusty top, making turns fairly hard. To make things worse, the back side was closed, and even corniche was closed (they claimed wind hold, but wind was not that bad at the top).
So, we were left with riding the wall, which they could not fill to capacity due to it being half broken, which soon gave for long lines.
Luckily, it started snowing soon after the lifts opened, and by noon, it was snowing pretty hard. By then Corniche has finally opened (about freaking time), and the afternoon made for much better riding in pretty wet, but still fresh snow. For the last hour, we had enough new snow that it felt like a powder day :) That's a good thing since Jennifer was here for her first time this year, and the weekend wsa worthy enough :)
I also found out after the day was over, was that Heavenly apparently had many of its lifts closed for winds while they barely got any snow while Kirkwood got enough powder by the end of the day that it was fairly nice to ride.

Beautiful weather at kirkwood :)

and here's the track & stats of the day at heavenly
and here's the track & stats of the day at kirkwood.

What can I saw about the day? It was more then epic: I had never experienced over 3ft of fresh powder (in spots that had been closed and just got opened back today), and while I thought I was a decent powder snowboarder, today I realized that 3 ft of fresh powder is actually too much for me: despite having my binding stance as far back as they'd go, and knowing the basics of powder: keep your speed and lean back, it was too easy to just sink in deep powder and eventually have my weight shift forward, my nose dive in, and then either lose balance or just get stuck with my feet and board very well stuck under 3 ft of snow :)
Getting out of that situation is no fun, your hands are useless since you can't push against powder, so I basically had to throw my body (and basically face) forward, and roll so that I could eventually lift my board out of the very heavy powder that was keeping it down. I had to do this a few times, it was very straineous, and a good lesson that there can be too much of a good thing :)

But when I stuck to more reasonable 1ft powder stashes, it was a lot easier :)
I also got lucky today by managing close enough to first lift on Corniche, Wall, Eagle Bowl, and then Sunrise, giving nice powder runs each time :)

You might think this looks cool until you realize I had my board on and had to get out of this :)

Looking back at the day, it was both serious fun and very challenging, even if I didn't have the equipment or skill to make the best of them, the conditions were truly incredible: the best I have seen in 10 years of snowboarding.
It is however a bummer that because we had such a great day today, the snow will be mostly crap tomorrow because it was warm enough that it melted, and by the end of the day as the sun set, I could already tell that it was icing and crusting up on top. That's a shame for those who'll be there tomorrow :(

and here's the track & stats of the day.

The chain control guy was stopping every car to say be careful because of ice and earlier cars that lost it (probably over an hour ago) and the chain control had a 25mph sign.

15mn down the road, after passing over a crest, we get flagged by some pissed off CHP who was yelling at us for doing an estimated 40 (he had no radar, he just eyed it) when quite frankly we weren't pushing it at all and the road was actually fairly good.
While we got ticketed, he started stopping and yelling at other cars all doing over 25 too, and stopped the next car he could get after "taking care of us".

When we drove 25 for the rest of the road to kirkwood, it just enticed pissed off traffic behind us to do dodgy passes, creating more harm and danger than allowing people to drive a more reasonable speed.

In the meantime, the ticket is of course there, and I'm guessing they'll be there next weekend too, so if the conditions are similar, you get the choice between not risking a ticket too much and risking to create accidents while blocking traffic, or going a more reasonable speed and risking a ticket.

Good luck :-//

Anyway, snow fell, so we had to be there. It's true that there was a lot of uncovered or badly covered terrain, one could not even drop safely from the wall, due to lack of coverage still, but there were enough covered spots with enough snow to still have a good time. We also got to try the "new" tow rope at the top of the wave, and got way way out of bounds as a result :) This was the first time I actually used my GPS at kirkwood to find out if we were hiking back towards the lift, or not.

Arturo, stuck over rocks

kite surfing on an ice lake

Here's a track of my day at kirkwood.

That night, we stayed at the very nice Alpenrose Inn, walking distance from the Heavenly Gondola.
Day 2, we went to Heavenly. It only got a few inches of fresh snow, but by skiing Mott Canyon and trees (and Heavenly does have a lot of tree terrain), it was actually quite good despite the fairly windy and cold weather.

this was as nice as the weather ever got

I can't believe that heavenly was still making snow

snow coverage was borderline coverage for february

pretty sights though

and here's a track of my day at heavenly.

Thanks much to Arturo for getting our butts there, and back.

Anyway, one thing I noticed was that the said receiver was using a ridiculous 45W when in standby mode (vs 55W when on).
It became a bit pathetic was that when I called Onkyo to ask them what was the expected standby use, and they were unable to tell me (after 2 calls and two techs). They then sent me to a support center that just would not help me without me sending my receiver in for repair when I wasn't even sure it was broken. They, too, were unable to tell me if 45W for standby was conceivably normal.
After adding Xmas in the mix and another trip where I wasn't home to take care of this, I called amazon late January (two months after purchase), explained the problem and they agreed to just send me another unit for free so that I could see whether 45W was normal or not, and return the old or new unit with a prepaid label. That was about the best support one could have hoped for (it's worth to note that the receiver went back to $800 in the meantime).

Turns out this was not all for naught, the new receiver registered exactly 0W when in standby. Kudos again to Amazon for outstanding service.