The slides that ran over Cascade Traverse and the closed trails on the upper mountain combined to create some fantastic human obstacles courses given the "last day nothing else but Mission Ridge open" crowds. Stuff that had been skied a bit was pretty fun. It felt a lot more like post-season touring at the area than in-season lift riding from a coverage perspective - definitely a heads-up sort of inbounds day!! They closed upper I for a little while somewhere around 2:30 to allow for safer extraction of someone who had apparently taken an injurious spill right by the lower entrance. Not a shock given how many people were clearly in over their heads at various spots.
I took my only fall of the day while standing still after my first lift ride (waiting for some friends to come up Armstrong), waiting in a (I thought) safe spot that could be well seen from above and was "guarded" by a little one foot tall tuft of shredded evergreen stobs poking out of the snow just uphill of me. A guy plowed his snowboard right through the thicket of stobs and slammed into me - fortunately his board hit my boot and binding and not my leg above my boot, and I slammed down onto the snow hard enough to bruise a bit but fortunately nothing worse. He fell just above me and nearly karate chopped me with his board as he wildly swung it over toward me in a blindly reflexive attempt to right himself, but I yelled at him to stop and wait for me to move out of his way (and I think I kind of grabbed/pushed the nose of his board before he had given it too much momentum) before doing any more damage to me, and he relented. Fortunately his fleeing-lemming behavior was NOT a harbinger of what the rest of the day would hold - all in all it was a fun day and the crowds actually not as impactful on the experience as on some other closing days in seasons past. Oh, and my friend who watched the whole thing from a few feet away said he sounded pretty drunk (at 11AM) when he made some pathetic excuse for his antisocial behavior.
