April 7, 2014 Timberline, OR

We spent the night in the Timberline parking lot in our van with a great view of the ski area and the south climbing route. We started skiing at 9am and by 10am it was warming nicely with a  bit of slush. On  April 6 we read that the skiing at Timberline was not fun and there was a bit of rain. We missed that day. On Monday it was sunny and getting warm, and the off-piste areas were warming the rain surface.  At 11am we rode the upper lift with a woman with tele gear (a former forest ranger) who showed us her last run.  She said it was time to ski the ungroomed with 2” of great corn. Jill was a believer and took off the groomer for the untracked snow; I watched her barking and skiing the wind blown and rained-on slopes that had turned creamy. She stopped and waved to me to join her. I must say that she usually follows me, but she was skiing some new lines.  It was great to watch her ski.  She only said “just follow me”. Damn, that was great.  A wonderful day. 

Glad you got to find out first hand. The skiing on the 5th and 6th was tons of fun but the weather was a challenge. We left dripping wet on the 5th and were not completely dry when we made our first turns in the precip. Sunday morning. By Sunday afternoon we were skiing under sunny skies and our gear dried out from the sun. It was a bear to work on Monday but I knew that Tuesday would be a ski day. Yesterday things got soft pretty early down low but the fun was still there. Unfortunately something malfunctioned on Jeff Flood while we were on the chair. Took us close to 40 minutes for us to get off the chair and the ran it forwards and backwards several times. I never found out what was wrong but I saw that they did remove one chair. Flood was back in business for the rest of the day. We saw work in progress on Palmer so I'm optimistic about the chance for Palmer laps this weekend.