Worst Ski Season Ever?

[quote author=MW88888888 Get a bunch of people together and they feel entitled to good snow.<br>[/quote]<br><br>I hardly need others to help me feel entitled to good snow. Alas, this may be my problem. <br><br>I've been chasing snow for the last 10 years, and it just hurts is all. All complaining aside, I just live for the white room, and I wait all spring, summer and fall for a chance to step into it. When winter comes and we dont get it, I just get bummed.<br><br>I'm certainly not sitting on my couch and crying in my milk, but recycled pow aint the same, and corn aint the same. No place like the white room.<br>

Haven't seen much from me this winter on TAY 'cause I like my stashes of powder just the way they are - untouched.

<br><br>MW8 I feel for you. I kinda felt the same way. And for the same reasons you stated I to have held off from writing tr's. But after frequenting this site for a few years I have come to certain realizations. Riding your own stashes year in and out is sure fun but then what. What good are powder stashes if you always keep them to yourself. I'm learning part of the buzz is taking someone somewhere new and feeding off their energy of being there for the first time. Also I'm a firm believer of what comes around goes around. Show me yours and I'll show you mine. Stashes that is.

Lowell - as I drive at 70 on a 6 lane highway to skiing/hiking/climbing that is w/in an hour of my home, I sometimes marvel at the investment in travel time those pioneers put in to get to the goods. Clearly they made travel/approach tradeoffs that are even more significant that Sky's to get in any outings. They must have seen the travel as part of the fun (the oral history book, I think it's called Cascade Voices, has some entertaining tavel stories that seem to back this up). I think we have a different relationship to the "getting to the trailhead" portion of our trips these days. I at least try to get my head more in their space when I remember to think of them. The travel can be fun - it's partly about choosing how to view it. And again, it's partly about tradeoffs and luck. Alan seems to envy my ability to take frequent full weekend days. I'm assuming he has kids who "tie him down," which I sometimes envy. But I've made a choice I fully accept.<br><br>Juan - what about the green room? I hear it's even more seductive than the white room. For me, I'm pretty happy as long as I'm not dealing with the kind of crust that cuts your face when you faceplant. Simple pleasures for simple minds.

Blaming the posting of TAY TRs for a rash of tracks on Ptarmigan Ridge is kind of silly. As we have nearly all discovered, the general Baker area is one of only about three viable options this year for not destroying your bases, and Table/Ptarmigan is the most obvious tour in the Baker area. Each sliver of the ski community here whether online (TAY/CC/SnowboardSeattle/PowderMag) or conventional (dudes that work at Feathered Friends and their friends of friends, BoeAlps) each has their own reporting system of some type and word gets out. The only people you're necessarily un-informing is our immediate community; the other communities may or may not read TAY, and may or may not have made the same discoveries you have, etc etc. Oh and BTW, cmon people this is Baker. Look at the tracks esp in close and note how many are snowboard tracks with boot tracks heading out (I am pretty sure most of OUR boarders have got split by now ). It shares a parking lot with a ski area, and every person that's ever ridden up C1 can SEE the tracks over there and know that it has and can be skied and they'd like to go there some time, and they didn't have to go to the internet to figure that out. It goes with the territory. <br>I'll grant that this is a sliding scale. I won't begrudge anyone that doesn't post TRs for anything that's not in Burgdorfer's, or for lines that they themselves plan to return to in less than a couple days even if it is in Burgdorfers.

Wolfs - agree with you that snowboarders who hike are accounting for a lot of the tracks on Table (and the ski area policy of requiring avy equipment and knowledge paired with their seminars is likely incenting folks to expand their range way beyond booting a little bit up Shuksan Arm), but not on the tracks out toward Coleman Pinnacle which are not boot tracks. And if it were just for tips at a ski shop or a guidebook, then I don't see why Xmas versus now would be any different - my theory is that there was a bit of a triggering event (or events) here. I'll grant that there are other networks than TAY that are getting the word out, but read The Tipping Point and ponder the impact of the "connectors" - the folks who read multiple reports about Baker on TAY and connect that info to these other networks. It's not that absurd a hypothesis that TAY had a big impact here. But it's just a hypothesis - it would be hard to prove one way or another.

At least one of the triggering events was the snow pattern on 2/4-5/05, one of the last days it actually snowed. On that day everything north of Stevens got 12 inches or more of nice light snow and only a little wind. Everything south got a few inches of wet stuff and more wind. I still ended up going south a couple times myself anyways, but went north eventually because I remembered that pattern. Prior to that date the north-south split wasn't as distinct. The following storm on 2/12-13/05 might have been similar.