Feb 11, 2014, Steven's Pass

I'm not sure if I'm more of a snow snob or if the reports from Alpy and Crystal were overly optimistic, but the conditions at Steven's today weren't nearly as good as I'd hoped.

With reports of 8 inches overnight and 18 inches in the last 24 hours it seemed like Steven's would be a safe bet for some good snow today. The telemetry from last night indicated that temps were 29 degrees or lower as the snow fell so the quality seemed like it would be good. However, what we found was not so much powder as it was 10+ inches of slab. At first I thought it looked like wind slab, but after playing around in it for a few hours my guess is that the snow was wet and warm as it fell and it consolidated into a thick slab layer. Patrol bombed aggressively but I didn't see any evidence that they got the slab to break or slide. Instead there were many bomb craters on both the front and back sides of the mountain.

The riding was mediocre overall and there were basically two options. If you could manage to stay on top of the slab the conditions were smooth and fast. Alternately, with some very aggressive turning it was possible to consistently punch through the slab and ride more like it was powder. However, the reality was that the the crust was at that awkward stage were it wasn't possible to consistently stay on top or break through. The result was unpredictable riding that demanded constant attention.

It's going to be very interesting to see how future snow bonds to the layer I experienced today.

my weekday reports are always overly optimistic because even skiing cruddy snow can be more fun than punching keys at the desk.

This morning at Alpy conditions were similar on the first few runs, but once it got broken up and the temps climbed into the mid-30s, there wasn't much of an issue and the snow was soft, albeit heavy

Bummer. I was thinking Stevens would be skiing/riding great today. We didn't have any of those issues at Crystal. Just nice snow and mostly clear weather. I'll try to post a video by tomorrow night on my Crystal post for today. I have some editing to do first.

Yikes! Here's the NWAC observation from Steven's today.

Yikes, that's a scary NWAC video. I just posted a link to my video of the day at Crystal Mountain. Go to the TAY report on Crystal for 02/11 and scroll to the bottom of the comments for the link.