There were leftovers of Tuesday's foot plus snow if you went outside the lines a little bit. Cool temps had helped preserve, mostly. There was significant warmup on backside though in places where wind was not blowing, sometimes sticky or gooey, will make sun crust on anything south or east facing, but that's probably academic considering how warm tomorrow will get. Toured my usual sidecountry haunts at least once each. Top part Highland trees was good but below about 4500 started touching down on the weekend crust more than I'd like. Anything true north facing or shaded by big trees was better. Signs of sun warmed point releases in various places both frontside and backside when south facing, and across highway on Skyline too. Around 1:30 high clouds built quickly, might be a good thing for snow preservation.
What time I spent on grooomed runs yielded really good conditions, springlike but in a good way. Pretty light crowd. great views at least til that 1:30 cloud up.
Over in Grace Lakes, noted that the whole flat lake area was unusually trampled. Turned out there was a lot of patrol from various ski areas out there for some kind of an avy dog training camp. Looked like they had even built some snow caves and were all planning to spend the eve. Interesting to see how well behaved the dogs that weren't being trained were. Their handlers must've told them "stay" and planted their butts in the snow at various intervals such that they were apart from each other and wouldn't get into mischief.
