Despite running low on energy after making it to my friend's house in North Van at midnight the night before, spirits were high on Saturday for a BIG day at Blackcomb. The sun was shining and the temps in the valley were hovering around 60F when we arrived a hair before the 10am opening. Everything from Wizard Express up was fair game, which at $55 for a ticket was an incredible deal (heck, in the middle of the season I rarely seem to ride both mountains in the same day or ride much down low). Started out on lower slopes, lapping groomers off Solar Coaster and Excellerator chairs, then moving up to Jersey Cream after 11. I didn't know corn that hearty grew in British Columbia!
By noon everything had softened-up nicely and we were rewarded with excellent, smooth and high-speed lines through Lakeside bowl. Around 12:30 we opted to give Spanky's Ladder a go - which to our surprise was being handled as a sidecountry zone with the resort's "temporary" boundary hugging the ridge down to Crystal chair. Faced with lightly-tracked 3-6 inches of corn snow we dropped into Garnet bowl, whooping it up, and funneled down the right side of Ruby. Sluff management was essential as the shallow layer of wet snow easily released, but did not propagate significantly. At the bottom we watched a pair of skiers navigate Zut Zut out of Sapphire bowl, setting off significant wet slides on the sun-baked face. We noticed Spanky's Chute proper didn't have a track through it - so we hustled out on the cat track, fortunate to find continuous snow the entire way back to Excellerator. Back at the top of Spanky's an hour later, the corn had only gotten deeper and less stable, and as I traversed left out of Spanky's Chute above the midway rock I cut loose a small wet slide which ran most of the way to the valley floor. We decided we'd had enough adventure and rode the bed surface of the slide down.
At this point my friend was exhausted, running on less sleep than myself, so I finished-up the day by grabbing one of the last chairs up 7th Heaven and dropping a smooth line through the skier's right of Couloir Extreme then heading back to Wizard Express to download in the warm afternoon breeze. A quick pint on the patio @ Merlin's let us reflect on a superb day and raise a toast to WB for letting us keep playing through May!
