A couple of amazing days at Stevens.
Thursday was the powder day. Snowing moderately throughout day, the powder was mostly what had fallen the night before as the temps dropped from the Tue/Wed rain event. The Wednesday snow report had painted a grim picture of that rain crust. If you didn't avoid areas the wind had scoured, you would still find that crust. But it didn't take long to figure out the recipe for where all that blown snow had landed: lee edges of treelines. And there the snow was awesome. Pretty much did variations of the same thing near the north backside ropeline all day and often the only tracks I crossed were my own from the run before. Wind was blowing hard on the ridgelines but even there the blown snow wasn't painful to the face, and once you were couple hundred feet below ridge it was fine. Not much snowbomb action in forest and no drip crust, all buried. Light crowd. Should've left much earlier for my "half day" at work but it was just too good to bail on til the last possible acceptable definition of 'half day'. On drive home, remarkable snow squall near Zeke's dropped half inch of snow on road in just a few minutes.
Friday was the blue bird day. Most of the day spent on groomers with my family but had a hall pass for first few hours to see what was leftover from Thursday. Several equally amazing runs thru Grace Lakes, but this time in perfect weather. The ski area itself had at least three times as many people as Thursday's crowd; some school districts had day off (like my daughter's) and a blue bird day like that draws people out. Groomers we sampled all were nice. Very occasional leftover icepatches on backside but 99% bitchin. We saw quite the herd (horde?) of telemarkers descending the backside 2ish. No wind, cool in shade, but given the overnight temps well below zero, it really was decent temp during the day.
