Crystal - 2012 season (or 2011 spring season)

Yeee Haaa, get ready the full blown marketing report is coming….Didnt expect to great on the conditions – a little new every once in a while over the last few days, pretty cool, but some heat at times to smooth things out the last three days….planned on getting up normal late for a week day, woke up a half hour early, listened to the morning report – new snow(more than expected) , lifts start cranking at 8am!!!...jump into hyperdrive. Arrived at 7:50 to mid A lot parking, jumped onto a empty bucket at 8:10am – pass didn’t work but the liftops kinda know me, so they took the pass to get it worked on while I got a bunch of fun deep new smoky runs off the top. Started carefully, but every poke into the fringes of the front side or GV made for more and more and more. Did the Gondy bucket run 4 times mid morning from Exterminator skier left to Snakepit ? lots of great empty untracked deep lines. Lots of solo bucket rides for antisocial me! A few Door runs from number 1 to 5 or so, all fun, as long as you dodged the biggest lumpy looking bumps. M-World might happy also. PB was the big one when the vis was good – got lucky about that both times I did it - both times deep and smooth and the first time untracked - second time I was cutting my early trackes. Skier left and right of HC chair line were pretty fun, again with good vis windows. Clouds and sun kept changing places – the skiers on the King looked big when I could see them. Kept lookin at my watch about how my body felt…but the whole day was an hour earlier than normal, which was great since the snow quality early was winter nice and got pretty heavy by the time I bailed out. The wimpy Coombas were a great choice today, the snow under the new was still wet carveable on most of the mountain that I did today…sorry for all the marketing hype….not sorry that all the hardcore folks did not show up today – more for me. Could have used someone around to pick a run every once in a while….oh well…got a 40k day for late 2011 or maybe early 2012! Might be a little diff tomorrow. ddk

It really was an exceeded expectations kind of day. Pretty much no one there all day. I rarely rode the lift/gondola with anyone. Best conditions were anything north facing that had stayed smooth. Great runs off of Chair 6 and Powder Bowl, boot top deep in alot of places. Finally connected with ArtF at about 1pm and made some nice turns together. Best snow of the day was definitely off/below the King. You could feel the warming on all but north slopes in the afternoon. A full on storm cell came in at about 2pm, which cut visibility to zero. So much for the last run of the day off the King, so we bailed back down to Chair 6. The amazing part of that last run was that at 3pm we were skiing untracked next to lines I'd made at 11am.

HUGE debris all over A-basin. Watch out if the visibility isn't good.

^^^^what he said!