Weekend warrior report for the first day of ski schools. I was expecting a lot of people and not so great skiing. The former was certainly true but the latter gave me a pleasant surprise. Most of the crowd (lots of families and teens) seemed hung up in the lodge so when the lift opened at 8:45 the first wave disappeared in about 5-10 minutes and I scooted right onto Chinook. Started with nice Valley-Burg and then Lucky Shot. The line on Rex was building so went to GV for a few runs until that line ballooned. We headed over for a PB run and arriving at FQ at about 10:10 there were only about 10-15 people in line. PB was its usual “best run on the hill” so we decided to repeat only to find the FQ line was now its usual mob scene. With no line on C6 (all day long too) we decided to try a chair side run. By the way, the top of 6 is bad and was getting worse quickly. There was about 1 inch of new on top of crust and while it was noisy and sounded horrible it actually skied very well so we did a bunch more of those. We stopped for an early lunch and came back out with short lines on Rex so we gave Sunnyside a try and it was good. Spent the rest of the day on the frontside, a couple more PBs and full Exterminator (upper good, lower very bad). Rode with patrol on the Gondy and heard that they had a lot of business on FQ due to the hard snow and fast skiers mixing in with the slower ones. Be careful out there. The chairs were running fairly well today but on one stop of Rex the lift op in the overhead came out with a foot diameter roller or disk of some kind. Maybe that was just one of those extra parts that isn’t really needed. Thanks to CB for the company and no thanks to his son for making me feel old and slow.
