Next day: windy with almost all lifts on wind hold. Only 2 lifts open and crowded. We got in 3 runs and bailed out. That afternoon, it started snowing, and didn't stop. By next morning it had dumped 5 to 6 inches of fluffy new snow on the mountain, and it was still coming down.
So on the morning of Thursday 17th, Susie and I headed up to the mountain with Pam and Howdy for our first REAL POWDER day. And let me tell you, when it gets like this the locals, and everyone else, turn feral. There are no more polite "after you"s, in fact when the lifties opened the gondola there was almost a stampede, skiers and boarders running for the first gondolas. As the locals are fond of saying, "There are no friends on powder days!" There was about a foot of new snow on the mountain and we mad some new tracks and Howdy kept taking us to more steep untracked stuff. Stuffed at day's end aint the word!
It kept snowing Fri night, so the powder was deeper next day. And even deeper on Sunday - UP TO OUR KNEES! So did Susie and I perform? Hell no! After sorta getting the hang of it in 3 to 4 ins of soft new stuff on the 18th, we thought we could handle it. Naah. When it's up to your knees it becomes a different ball game, and while both our skiing, in general, has continued to improve, we still suck in deep powder. Pity. Lying in bed at night, I can picture myself carving beautiful turns through untracked knee deep fluffy snow, but the reality is very different. Suffice to say I planted my head in a number of different places on the mountain over a couple of days. On my very last run on Sunday (Susie had retired to a double shot latte!), Pam took me out to some deep untracked stuff on Beaver Slide to try to get a decent shot of me in powder. Alas, to no avail. The last instruction was "Ski down to Howdy." See below! So there's a lot of hard work to do before we're proficient in powder, and it's hard work, but lots of fun!
 |
| Somebody miscalculated on the 20th, the day with19+ inches of new snow. |
Pam says we didn't do too bad in the 18th (she will work on us some more when we come back in March):
