Alpental, 2/3/07

After a few hours of boring skiing at Ski Acre and Hyak, we decided to depart from the pass. But, alas, the Pass was closed for avy work (sometime around noon). The good news was that Alpental opened up but a few minutes after we learned of the closed state of the road.

Alpental was wonderful. There were probably all of 45 people there. We skied 3 runs on the bottom chair, all untracked, all wonderful. Then they opened the upper chair, whereupon we proceeded to ski Felsen, Snake Dance, Snake Dance, the Fan, Lower I trees. We rounded the day off with a last run down Dom for good measure.

The snow was interesting. I pushed the whole length of my pole and arm into the snow and couldn't find the bottom. Yet, we were really only skiing the top 12"-18". It seemed like the bottom 5 feet had already started consolidating. Nevertheless, the snow was deep and light. One of the best days of the year, so far.

We saw and heard the helicopter rumored to be dropping bombs on Mt. Snoq, but saw no evidence of any slides down the Phantom or elsewhere. Does anyone have any idea what went down (in both a literal and figurative sense)?

I count myself lucky enough to have been there too.  A day I will remember for a long time!

The first guy down The Fan got injured.  Took him about a half hour, with ski patrol's help, to find a buried ski that had come off.  There was some blood on the snow and he had blood on his face, too. But eventually he skied away on his own power.

The DOT site gives some info on what they were doing with the heli. www.wsdot.wa.gov/News/2008/02/I-90SnoqualmiePassopen.htm

Crews closed the road in both directions between Cle Elum and North Bend around 10:30 this morning. They prepared the helicopter for take off and it was finally airborne with our Avalanche Control Supervisor, Craig Wilbour, on board.

Their first pass over the west side of Snoqualmie summit near Bandera was successful. Then they looked at Granite, the site of last week’s large slide. They got a visual confirmation that the natural and controlled work over the past several days did the trick. They looked at adjacent avalanche paths and make similar observations. Deteriorating weather – a low cloud cover – forced crews to bring the helicopter down.

Our crews report using 190 pounds of explosives: six 30-pound and one 10-pound shots.

“Our goal was to take the avalanche risk from moderate to low,” said WSDOT Maintenance Engineer Todd Trepanier. “We did that.”

Rats! left right before the pass closed and missed alpental. Missed all the good uncrowded days last week too! Rats!

Seemed like a good portion of the Alpental hardcores were at Hyak as an alternative to alpental. Wasn't so bad from 8:30 until 9:15 when they noticed that the chairs were four feet off the ground well up the hill into the skiing zone and decided to stop and dig out/rope off for an hour. But it really was pretty tracked up before they started to run the lift (Hyak didn't open Saturday). What happened to completely untracked Hyak on first-day-of-the-week morning opening? Is it all people touring up there? Staff poaching? Even the glades were half-way tracked out before first chair, and someone had already hit the little cliff ...