April 13, 2008, Closer Bash at Stevens Pass

Season ender for Stevens. Another good party. Dummy downhill well attended and entertaining. They built a huge pond this time for the pond skim, dead center in the plaza. But since the windup for it was pretty much the lower third of the bigchief run, many people cleared it with ease and impressive speed. An amusing mix of obvious pond skim vets, and spectacularly crashing rookies.
On the actual ski hill, classic spring conditions. Had some refreezing because of clear night but generally was soft from the start. Backside in afternoon was not even that bad as far as stickiness. Great conditions for bouncing off bumps and staying in the fall line. Good tele learning conditions too I thought.
Was also up there Friday. Conditions were similar although at least at the start was cooler. Snow could be stickier in spots because some of it was more recent.
Too bad they aren't going to go another weekend here. Easily enough snow, and it was so well attended today that I could easily imagine they'd get decent numbers if they added a surprise bonus weekend on.

I was there Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I saw quite a few telemarkers, but I only had the opportunity to talk to several of them. I may have seen you; what do you look like, wolfs? Do you mind if I add a few pictures from the weekend?

Add pix away. Would be particularly interested if you got pond skim pix (or mov). I chose not to try and photograph that because I was standing in one of the "hose zones" where people that had both strong style and malicious intent could carve a turn and spray the gallery (and their cameras) with water.
Telemon, I was on the lookout for your stated description of "gray bearded telemarker with unusual style" but had forgotten your color scheme. Based on that truncated description, I saw at least three people that could've been you! Me ; on Sunday I was with my 7yo daughter and wearing a red hawaiian shirt.

I wasn't able to stay for the fun events (the blast give me a startle while in the parking lot). I've placed a photo from each day. Day 1 we enjoyed the various runs on the back side until the stickiness of the lower snow encouraged us to hit the trees in the Waybacks , Corona Bowl and Andromeda Face. The first photo has Paul dropping down Double Black. Day 2 started out with bluebird conditions again and Orion was nicely groomed for warm up runs. Borealis was mogul-free in the morning.I was given a tour of the Polaris Bowl by a lift mechanic and a low-stance tele-lady. I spent the afternoon skiing various lines off of 7th Heaven. I am in photo 2. My friend, Sue, is a cautious tele-lady. She was rather intimidated by the flying skiers that passed her on Orion Sunday morning (see photo 3). I believe that I saw you, wolfs, on Aquarius around 10 AM, because I did see a telemarker there with a relatively small child above us (2 red jackets and 1 blue one). It was nice to see so many, (well, relatively so many) tele people out on the slopes.