Marc's Public Blog - Skiing / Snowboarding / Snow

Jim's Spider Spikes got us over Carson Spur way before it closed

Friday morning looked like an epic day, but unfortunately winds shut all the lifts down. In the end, coop organized for a Cat to give us a few rides up solitude. Wheather was pretty bad though.

Next morning was full storm

Coop giving us a briefing on cat skiing

Stood in line 1h to get a ride up

Cat finally showed up

Next morning was much better, a great bluebird day. Unfortunately that was on a saturday, so it got busy and tracked out quickly.

Pow!

I went a bit further off the wall to get the snow

Backside was pretty too

Got way by the ski line and ended up on top of chair 4

Third day was another nice bluebird, but less powder to find by then:

People watching the big skiier contest

Crazy skiiers going down the cirque

decent amount of snow for the first day

While wednesday and thurday were supposed to be the best day, the storm was a bit late and wednesday was just windy, shutting many lifts down, but only had a foot of snow or so (although plenty fell during that day).
We opted for not going to Kirkwood and went to Heavenly instead. This was the right call sicne Kirkwood only ran a couple of baby lifts and had both its roads closed for quite a while. Heavenly wasn't great since not a lot was open, but it was good enough for the day:

there were a few hours of light

but it was cold, this was just melted snow caught in my goatee

snow was still pretty deep by the end of the day

The next day, we went to Kirkwood which nicely opened Cornice, on time even. Snow was quite good, but conditions were pretty bad. It was cold, visibility was really 0 at some times (I got off the lift at cornice and had to literally look for the dropoff to get back down. I just didn't take many pictures because there wasn't much to see, and my right hand was freezing when I was taking it out of my glove (I actually got some amount of fingertip frostbite with blisters that are still healing 2 days later).

that's probably the best vis we got all day

Snow was good, but it was difficult to enjoy. Unfortunately we had to get back thursday when the best day before the weekend crowds was definitely friday. Darn... Oh well, what we got was still nice.

A big thanks to Matthew for getting us there and back in record time in his WRX Sti with snow tires.