January 11, 2006  Alpental

What a change from yesterday!<br><br>Snow levels last night/this morning came down below Denny Creek exit. By the time I got to the base area, there looked to be 9-10" new. It dumped for most of the day from there on, and was still dumping when I left. Skied a lap on Gunmount and then a long run down Upper-I-&gt;Adrenalin-&gt;lower BC. Great fresh pow pretty much everywhere. <br><br>After helping out with the Medina program I headed out for a few laps on Chair 1. Skied several laps on the gladed face up to climbers left at the top of the chair. There was quite a bit of untracked there and I was able to trigger some small soft slabs from 8-15" deep. I think they may be going on sleet layers in the new snow so these results probably vary a lot with elevation. Regardless, stuff will be running tonight/tomorrow.

I noticed the same activity. Its pretty easy for the slabs to release right now with all the moisture content in them from the day before. I would be very suspect to wind loaded areas right now

periods of heavy precip this evening in the form of gropple, as if we don't have enough funky snow layers to wonder about.<br><br>Alpental patrollers closed the cat-track that leads over towards Eisfallen/Dom/Lower Int about 8:00pm due to avy hazard (from the Shot 6 terrain and such above I guess).<br><br>So much new snow up there, nice to see that the torrential rains from a couple days ago didn't mess things up too badly.

Wow was it crowded up there tonight... looked like a Saturday afternoon. The snow was really nice, but with essentially only 1 run open, it was a little too much of a zoo.  The terrain features are disappearing under all the new snow .<br>After 2 runs, we headed over to Summit West's terrain park, which was nice and quiet.  Lots of deep wet fresh nearly-impossible-to-ski snow there, they got lazy with the groomers I guess .<br>From brief probing into some untracked at Alpental, the snow seemed heavy on a lighter layer down below. Some small slabs had released on skier's right at the top.

Soft over rainsoaked over sleetsheet. Not surprised that the cattrack (cascade traverse) was roped.<br><br>1/11/06 - Night at Alpental - Whe we arrived at Summit West around 7ish, it was 32 degrees with mixed rain/snow at the lot (which had 4" of new), so headed over to Alpental for more altitude. Lot 4 had a good 6" of new and it was graupling instead of liquid. The day folks had really shredded the hill up so I was unable to find anything more than an occasional knee-deep traverse. I was on fats, but they were overkill. Cat track out to lower Nash roped off at the top due to avy hazard, so we just did St Bernard, Sessel, and the mainline of Debbies (with one veering over into lower Meister at the bottom of the rope). TomK & Kerry.