Crystal - 12/22 Second Opening Day

First bucket, arrived way to early, bigger crowd than first opening, better snow, nice sun,
Big GV lines mid day like last year. No soup. A lot full with overflow, Pay lot not so full.

First bucket, arrived way to early, bigger crowd than first opening, better snow, nice sun,
Big GV lines mid day like last year. No soup. A lot full with overflow, Pay lot not so full.

Finally got a post using Chrome....works okay now that I know my password again....never have gotten anything good recently with IE.

Patrol opened Lucky Shot about 3:10.  BIG knot of people there for the rope rise. I took one more GV to let them clear out.  Lucky skied nice, but the second steeper face was skied down to a crusty layer when I got there.  Also some of the more traveled areas of GV- same. Gondy line about 10:15 was all the way around the lodge, so if you go up Tue.  Hope that Chinook Ex is running. Skied all the way to the base last run but just barely. Huge GV crowd cleared out nicely about 2:00 so got in some nice yo yo.  Patrol was blasting 6.

I let ddk have the first hour of waiting and lined up 12 buckets back, giving up the first lap. It took 7 laps for the Amazing Gondy Line to fill in the GV chair line as we skied boot-top cut pow. Although the C-3 line became huge, it moved faster than it looked. Nice cut pow for awhile, turned to packed pow, got a little heavy in the few sunny spots, and turned to fun cut up bumps for the afternoon. After a few long waits, the C-3 line disappeared and quick laps ensued again. A mob of snowboarders destroyed the Grubstake Traverse and points north as they sought out rocks and places to launch head-planting cartwheels. Tomorrow’s additional terrain won’t add much more steep or deep but will spread the crowd.

Ken
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here are a few images from the day
www.flickr.com/photos/11723786@N06/sets/72157649483381948/
the solstice light was beautiful