Snow in Tahoe!

[Kimberly]

Well it finally snowed in Tahoe and the skiing has been great! This last storm was a little nudge from mother nature that the resorts needed to open up some more terrain. Temperatures have been pretty chilly therefore keeping the snow quality good. Hopefully there is more in store in the week to come! Viva Powder Days!

[ckuck]

Looks like it's dumping everywhere in the Sierras! A Weather Channel geekette was at Northstar yesterday, asking lame questions about running chair lifts in the wind. There's somebody who could obviously benefit from a NASTC course or two... ;)

I'm off to Mammoth on Sunday for five days of what looks to be epic pow conditions, if the roads will let me through. :eek:

Jumpstart was the investment, this will be the payoff! I'll post a report when I get back. :cool:

[rusty]

Is the power back on yet? I want to hear stories of massive cornices!

[Kimberly]

Carl still waiting on that report....;) The snow here in Tahoe was UNREAL! I skied in the big blizzard day, which was Saturday and despite the 1 chair visibility the skiing was fantastic. In any other situation I might have been sent to an asylum for giggling stupidly all day. I think skiers are the only ones who love it when we inhale a mouthful of powder! A toast to mother nature for this one!

[ckuck]

Carl still waiting on that report....;)

Is the power back on yet? I want to hear stories of massive cornices!

:beat_dead_horse: OK, OK, I'm baaaaaack... :D

So anyway, there we were - 6 hours after CalTrans opened 395N - on the way to Mammoth. They reported something like 7 - 10 feet total from the storm, but it wasn't really powder as the combination of wind and moisture-heavy snow packed it down by the time we got to skiing on Monday. And yes, there were massive cornices. I just didn't ski off of them. :p Plenty of snow, however, most of the fun places had pretty good conditions and it was easy to avoid what rocks and trees there were. What was that article from Chris, "Ski The Whole Mountain"? Oh, behave!

Happy sandwich:

On the whole it was a great trip, not quite epic except in terms of skiing improvement. (See below.)

The weather got very bad in the afternoon a couple of times, and we generally quit around 2:00 - 3:00 in the afternoon.

Everything worked. Post-Jumpstart skiing was amazing, once I finally got on some real Western snow (2 days @ Bretton Woods NH just wasn't the same.) I pretty much only skied groomed runs when there was no other option. Off-piste was the order of the day, with the areas around chairs 9, 25, 3, 5, 8, 14, 6 (storm option) and 1 (what?) all getting our tracks. Crud (the mostly good kind) was eveywhere. The new express 9 chair is pretty nice, but invites lots of people too. There are a couple of runs down near the bottom, off-trail and not marked (shown on the maps, though) that we hit. Despite the amount of snow, there were still lots of small trees sticking out, the snow was heavy, but getting to the bottom and looking up my first comment was "How did we get down through all those trees????" Railroad Track drills, along with the work on tip pressure really seems to have helped. For some strange reason I'm finding the best way to deal with that kind of snow is just charge it. I'll have to ski more to make sure this wasn't a fluke... :cool: Jumpstart was the investment, this was the payoff (tm). ;)

Special thanks to Malcolm, Kemp, Hannes, and Dr. Jim for the help and inspiration! :drinking:

[Kimberly]

Nov 3, 2008 - Weekend storm total is about 2in. Better some than none and if the weather stays chilly (which it is likely to do) then the snow guns will begin their thundering. The mountains do look gorgeous covered in snow against the backdrop of stormy skies