Jan 7, 2007 Stevens

The snow was pretty fun at the top of the backside, when you got lower though, turns required a lot more work. Crowds were high, and apparantely patrol did their avy routes twice, so they didn't spin the lifts until around 9:15. They closed southern cross pretty early in the day (maybe 11:30?) That actually turned out well, because with all of the snow coming down, that side of the back stopped getting tracked. With a little effort, you could find the untracked. Around 2:30, we traversed over to the southern cross side of the hill, and saw 2 small windslabs (maybe 1 foot deep, 30 feet wide. One was skier triggered, but the other seemed to be natural. It was definitely spooky, as that run had been skier compacted 3 hours earlier. They closed 2 from 3:30 until around 6:00 to do avy control, so it was a long drive home.

I was up at Stevens as well and was surprised they got the mountain open at all, and perhaps they should not have. On my first run down the Winnie Chutes a big 12 inch by 200 ft soft slab was triggered by a snowboarder and covered the exit cat track in 3-4 feet of snow. Later in the morning riding Schims Meadow, we were easily triggering 3-6 inch soft slabs all the way down to the bottom sending quite a bit of snow down. Every run was being windloaded so quickly! I was soaked by 11am and I left by noon as the crowds were just too much. "Spooky" couldn't describe it better.

I was up on both Saturday and Sunday. Sat was a blast mainly because the westside was closed till I believe about 1. They opened skyline and hogsback at about 10:15 due mainly to the fact that they where short on staff. By the time they started loading skyline there was only about 10 people in line. Conditions where great with soft windblown snow, with fresh tracks available for quite awhile. Tye opened at about 11:30 but got mobbed pretty quickly but stayed great. Sunday was quite a different day with the rapid warm up and normal weekend crowds.