Schweitzer - 2/18 plus general observations

It was forecast to be overcast today, but instead we got sun and warm.  All the south facing slopes softened by mid-day and expanded our skiing into areas besides the north facers we’ve been skiing all week.  A good day ending with season high vert.

Observations from our week:  The snow coverage and quality is a lot better than home.  They can’t forecast the weather here.  Not one morning forecast was even close to accurate.  While the lunch food on the mountain was good, they are severely constrained in both seating capacity and kitchen capacity.  Little to no crowds this week and we’d go in for lunch on the early side and would still have a wait.  I can’t imagine what it’s like on a busy weekend like the one coming up.

We were warned that Schweitzer was a fairly intermediate mountain.  I partially agree.  There are tons of intermediate and advanced groomers.  In fact, some of the groomers are steeper than anything at Crystal Mountain. Picture running winch cats up Campbell Basin.  I found the bowls and chutes off both triple chairs to be as challenging as anything on the home mountain.  It’s unfortunate to get to a lot of it requires a double chair ride with the second chair being a slow speed fixed grip triple.  Still well worth it like skiing Powder Bowl.  We spent 80% of our time on the back side because it’s where the best snow was and the terrain was more to our liking.  A local told us they’d done a lot of tree thinning back there in the last two years creating many of the gladed tree runs we really enjoyed.  While they were all rated as advanced runs, I’d say half of them were more intermediate.  Still, a lot of fun due to the good snow.

Ended the week with 163K, so got in quite a bit of skiing.  Easy to do when you don’t have a drive home.