We skied Kirkwood on Friday. It was real good. We got in line for chair 6 around 8:30am, and I think it finally opened about 10:30am. The roads on the way in were in bad shape. Carson Spur was closed for a few days, and Carson Pass kept closing and opening throughout the day. Since the resort was hard to get to, it wasn't too crowded. The picture below shows a big crowd, but that's almost everyone who was skiing that day waiting for the chair to open. Once it opened, the crowd thinned out. It was nuking snow all day, and so lines that were tracked were getting refilled.
One annoyance is that while we were waiting in line for "avalanche control" a film crew got to do four untracked laps. One or two would have been reasonable, but four was excessive. Ski patrol even said that the film crew was slowing down their operations.
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| Waiting for chair 6. I'm with the group near the gap in the line. We got something like 12th chair. |
After the day was over, we checked the status of Carson Pass and it was open. But when we got there, we ended up waiting in a line of cars for 105 minutes. Later I learned that one of my coworkers had put his Tesla into a snowbank, and that was one source of the delay.
On Saturday, we went to Powderhouse Peak. Damn did it live up to it's name. We did 4 laps from top to bottom for a total of 6.5k vertical feet. It was exhausting, but the snow was so good. I didn't take any pictures that day, because it's all glades.
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| I was exhausted after Powderhouse, but I got a second wind and managed to dig out my car. |
On Sunday, we skied some resort + side country. I'm going to be purposefully vague, since I don't want to blow up anyone's spot. When we got to the resort a ski patroller noticed our gear, and asked where we were planning on skiing. We told him what we were considering. When I asked about wind slabs, he said that they had done a lot of blasting, but hadn't gotten any of the snow to react. That was excellent news, and confirmed our plan. First we did a little inbounds hike, and then we left the boundary and did some excellent chutes.
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| The main objective was the doglegging chute on looker's left. |
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| View from the bottom |
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| We did a second lap on a different chute. |
