Marc's Public Blog - Skiing / Snowboarding / Snow

I tried to time the storm systems and drove to kirkwood in between 2 storms, when Carson Spur was open. It was too cold and I had to drive at night, so the temperature and headlights made it so that I would have arrived at kirkwood with -4% battery from my after the fact estimate, but thanks to the new supercharger in Jackon, a 5mn detour and 10mn bathroom stop gave me more than enough battery to arrive there comfortably. Drive up took just over 3h45 with the charging stop and the snow:

the bad news is that most of the chargers are broken, and the 2 left are sharing the same power (only 20A each)

It was early season, KW had only been open for 3 days, so they were still getting things ready and cleaning up :)

coverage was amazing

Normally, 6 would have opened on tuesday, but didn't like I predicted, and opened late (11:30) on wednesday. It was a longer wait than planned, but better than nothing:

we all waited eagerly :)

and finally got up

plenty of snow

coverage on chamoix was amazing

Day #2 got an extra 17", which caused Cornice to open a bit late (9:50), but not terribly:

ski patrol was training

chamoix started being scraped a bit :)

this is why the run is called hole in the wall :)

plenty of freshies

Palisades opened

we were all eying the wall and hoping it would open the next day

Day #3 started being a bit repetitive running 6 all day, but we held hope for the wall opening:

beautiful conditions

by 13:00 people started lining up for the wall

so I went to join them and waited about 45mn

and at 14:00 it opened, wee!

people who waited 1h30+ got first tracks, but there were plenty for everyone

After lapping the wall until they closed it, I was definitely spent, and with a huge grin on my face :)

Before people cry murder about how bad it is for the environment, it's all indoors and temperature is controlled beter than ski resorts that spent untold amounts of energy to make a lot of snow that melts away on very big slopes. I don't have numbers, but my feeling is that it's actually not that bad in comparison, and it's cool for people there to be able to enjoy the snow when there is clearly none nearby.

This is what it looks like:

Like other places in Dubai, navigation was a bit tricky, I missed one exit and had to find far away street parking and jump some hedges to get in the mall eventually (or it would have been a 15mn drive to get all the way out and back in to the correct entrance). Got there eventually. I got in kind of late on a weekday, so I was lucky not to have any wait and got my gear right away. The guy was surprised when I asked a board of 164 and stance of 15R 30F. That was a bit aggressive and powder-day like, which is almost all I do :)

really cool to see a groomer indoors

the quad chair was not detachable and a bit slow, but note the nice leather seats

After a while I figured out that the tow rope was faster than the quad chair:

The run is of course not super long, but they have a mini terrain park at the top, and it was fun enough for almost 2H. Here's a vid:

I wasn't happy with Vail closing early (again the earliest in the history of kirkwood, not counting covid last year), but in the end, there was not a lot of snow, so it's probably not a huge loss.
I went with Deana who had been meaning to go to Tahoe, and this made the trip more fun for sure, especially on easter sunday where she definitely wanted to be in the running for bunny spirit :)

Carson Spur was honestly not showing a lot of snow, and despite the higher temps, the early morning was on the icy side outside of groomers, so it was a chasing the right snow, day:

Deana got some rentals:

getting ready for the day :)

it was easter, bunny ears

She then went mostly on chair 1 and 2:

A few pictures from higher up:

a few people still went hiking up, but the snow wasn't worth it for me

not very busy

Then, we did something I haven't done in many years: lunch :)

I went on the backside to check it out, it had started to melt, but still had snow:

the wall drop never got a lot of snow, and started getting questionable to ride again

And that was it for the weird 2020-2021 season. Not the best, but better than nothing.

lots of people, lines for getting food

the wall was pretty tracked out, but not that much snow at the top

The forecast for overnight snow went down to 6", but thankfully Kirkwood got 1ft, nice!

eagle bowl, not open yet

got more snow refills during the day

I went to the back side when it opened:

fawn ridge delivered

the line wasn't bad

I definitely got some good rides that day:

a later ride on fawn ridge:

Day #3 was a bluebird with pleny of pow left:

saw a heli land at martin point, not quite sure why

As a first (for me), I used half the day to hike two peaks, starting with Thimble Peak:

the other side was nice, but a bit bare

After Thimble peak from chair 4, I went to hike Glove Rock over palisades. As I expected, by the time I got there (15:40), the temperatures went down and the top crusted, making the ride down a lot less satisfying:

you have to hike far to see those signs

nice view of the back

it was spooky to ride on the other side of the ridge, away from the resort

I then rode the ridge some more

and afer another warning, it was time to ride back down

I wasn't the first person to do this :)

And that was it for day #3, very nice conditions, and snow that was good until 2/3rd of the 3rd day.

This was our last stop on Arturo's ski road trip

Day #1 was great, awesome pow for the location, we spent most of our time at Strawberry Bowl:

lots of lines to be had

The runs were wonderful:

Day #2 was still good, less pow, but still plenty of good snow:

we took the tram to John Paul Ridge

great view

lots of pow, still

After 4 days in Utah on Arturo's ski road trip, our next stop was Crested Butte in Colorado.

Crested Butte is not a mountain for beginners, and a bit on the bony side, but very interesting terrain. We got to meet Karl and Suwei:

great views

good pow on the sides, but you had to pay the price of getting back

the tow ropes were there to weed snowboarders :)

before the ride down

then the hike back up

Wanna smoke some rocks, dude

we went for banana to find some powder

Then another hike to another run: spellbound (hike was not that fun):

arturo didn't even make it to the beginning of the descent :)

it was a fun run down, with another hike to get out at the bottom

After a 2 day drive, this was our first stop on Arturo's ski road trip

We were in a yotelpad, small, but close to the lift:

nice cell phone tree

So much powder:

The trees were good:

Day #2: was lots of snow:

the next day, there was a bit of a line to get up, 45mn+

but pow!

did I mention snow?

The trees in the morning were lovely:

So much pow:

I went back to the trees and found lots of things hiding under the snow and got my snow pants ripped out :)

The powder in the other trees, was ridiculously good:

Day #3 was a bluebird:

even more lines

Day #4, we went to Park City:

still pow

stupid guy that kept photobombing my pictures

After a while, I got tired and took the traverse gondola back to Canyons:

big valley between

mid station where you could ski back down to either mountain

back to Canyons

a few crossing lifts

nice views

We got lucky and got an unusal early cold storm in January, which covered all the rocks and ice. I drove there on a tuesday afternoon before the storm hit, parked the car underground and waited for the storm and the lifts to open.

I made it in one shot (no recharging) and 11% left when I arrived. That was by far a best condition scenario: no headlights, no heat, no windshield wipers, and no snow to add rolling resistance. I know that it's not safe to attempt this in one shot if all the stars don't align, but on the plus side, there is now a supercharger in jackson (only 5mn detour), so it's much easier to charge if needed. That said, I only had to charge when I arrived at kirkwood.

Day #1, wednesday. Big dump, lots of wind, kirkwood only managed to open 6 (the only lift to the top) by 15:28 and promptly closed it at 16:00. Disappointing to say the least. The old kirkwood would have stayed open past 16:00 as a gesture of good faith. The new kirkwood, closed after 32mn:

Day #2, thursday. Another big dump. Thursday, they opened at 13:00 again (new dump). The "you had one job" twitter guy failed to tell anyone that anything opened. I just noticed it on the webcam and ran outside screaming "WTF?"
They closed at 15:00 sharp, because the road was closing at 15:30. They knew they were punishing every single person who paid you and KW to stay on site. They didn't care.
The old kirkwood turned away people for the lift if they didn't have logdging and kept them running until 16:00. The new KW closed for everyone.

Day #3, friday: the wall never opened. Again, it was probably hard to make safe, but I'm pretty sure they could have opened friday.

Johannes came to join me for a few hours:

Day #4, saturday. The wall didn't open until 10. Why? Nobody knows. And then it closed at 14:00 for reasons unknown.

by the weekend, people came, teslas filled the electric parking slots

there was a line by 07:30 already

Time to go to chair 4 that had just opened.

slight line to chair 4

probably first time of the year that the wave was rideable

fawn ridge

At the end of the time, I was able to retrieve my camera pouch I dropped off the lift:

So all in all the snow was fantastic, and kirkwood as a resort was beyond disappointing in multiple ways. I will seriously consider heavenly next time.

never seen the area outside of the snow season, pretty trees

I've only ever seen caples lake when it was frozen

Then, we went to check out kirkwood. This must have been the lowest snow coverage day I've seen at kirkwood :)

the wall

which button do I push? :)

it was fun to see the magic carpets. They can be raised as the snow level goes higher

the 'temporary' lodges

still stocked

After going around KW a bit, we went around Carson Spur:

avanlache prevention gates and avalanche triggering devices when the road needs to be cleaned

After parking the car, we hiked up from Carson Spur to Thunder Mountain, and back down to Silver Lake/Kit Carson. It was a pretty easy hike up to Thunder Mountain with great views of kirkwood, Caples Lake, top of Cornice lift, and Silver Lake.

nice to see the avalanche gates from so close

these trigger the slides for avalanche safety on Carson Spur

the smaller kirkwood lake

multiple big volcanic rocks

damn, I never hiked that far with my snowboard :)

getting closer to sentinel bowl/cornice lift

nice view of silver lake

We split off with Arturo, he went back to the car, and we continued the other way towards cornice and silver lake:

looks a bit rocky, probably not a big deal that I forgot to bring my snowboard

a sign frozen in time, left as is on the wretched day of March 14th when they closed

path to sentinel bowl

woohoo, I'm a lift operator now :)

never went down this way, but it was the way back to our path

kit carson

From there, Arturo met us on the road, and we drove home to end our 11 day trip.

The snow line wasn't too low when I started driving up, except for a bit of surprise slush when I was passing a truck. Thankfully my tesla stability control, did the right thing:

strangely, the road was quite clear higher up (localized snowfalls)

Carson Spur was still in very good shape

After a bit under 4H, including a 20mn recharging stop in Manteca, I arrived at Kirkwood just before 15:00:

Sadly, by then only solitude was open, I did 2 runs that weren't bad but on my 2nd run up, I got the very bad news that while Vail said they would stay open that same morning, a few hours later, while I drove up, changed their minds and closed off everything for the season due to COVID-19. Needless to say that I wasn't happy that they couldn't make that decision in the morning, and mislead everyone into coming:

those were 2 expensive runs

Now, life sucked, it was clear that I had to leave kirkwood as quickly as possible, as the weather was worsening, but my car was very discharged. I had to recharge it just enough to get out and hopefully make it to some charging source under the snow line.

I had to take the Omo Ranch Rd by Cook's Station to get the shortest path to the Placerville Supercharger, where I barely arrived with a 5% of battery left. Omo Ranch Rd, while open, is not a safe road with snow, and doesn't get plowed. The top was dicey and I had the tradeoff of getting down quickly to get out of the snow line, without driving off the road due to snow.
The tesla estimator has been very wrong, on the trip out, it told me I'd arrive with 14%, but I arrived with 5% while driving quite slow and taking an unsafe road (the safe road around would not have gotten me there with enough battery left):

estimator went from 14% to 9% to 5% by the time I arrived

thankfully it stabilized at 5%

on the plus side, the new superchargers are fast, I got back to 80% in 30mn

That's definitely been my worst snow trip ever, except for the fact that I avoided crashing my car on the way up after that slide, or running out of battery and having my car die on the side of the road in a snowstorm.