Under the guns on Superstar

Under the guns on Superstar

Whoa... probably one of the 5 best ski days of the 2006-2007 ski season! It was that good!

Last night at the inn the temperature hit -17F just before 2:00 AM. When I went to bed, my expectations were pretty low. I figured that the day would require extra body armor and frequent loops on one of the boxes. Boy were my expectations all wrong.

When I got to the mountain this morning, just before 9:00 AM, the temperature in my car read 2F. Now that may sound cold, but when there is no wind, a beautiful blue sky with a glowing warm sun, and you are expecting -10..well it was almost time to break out the bathing suit. We started out by doing 5 very fast loops on Superstar. The resort was blowing snow on the upper headwall, which was by definition nice soft powder. Middle and Lower Superstar were groomed sweet. I am not sure if the resort had tilled the surface over, but the surface was nice and soft. We just ripped side to side GS turns at high speed, as the 4 of us basically had the trail to ourselves.

As we were doing our fifth run down Superstar, a bus or something must have pulled in, because as we were going back up the lift for number 6, our beautiful soft empty trail was now filled with a variety of skiers and riders, so we decided to head south to Bear Mountain. We took the requisite loops down Bear Trap, Bear Claw, Wildfire, and Outer Limits. All were in good shape, although I would guess that neither Wildfire nor Outer Limits had been groomed overnight. Each had a slightly different firmness than the other runs we had taken. But by this time we were in full cruise mode. We were not making many wide turns because the crowds had picked up, so the fact that OL and Wildfire were firm did not really matter much.

We followed our usual route over to the Needles Eye area. The Needles Quad was running, which meant we could cover a lot of terrain with a short hop lift. Needles Eye was a lot like Wednesday, with loose packed powder on a medium firm base. The bump line was still in good shape on skiers right. I jumped in for a half a dozen bumps, but the guys were just cruising so fast, I needed to hop out to keep up. We hopped over to Bittersweet, took another run down Superstar (it was still great) then traversed over to the Snowden quad for a little cooling down before heading in.

On Snowden, we pushed down Chute to the Poma Cutoff. We did not want to go back down to the K1 if we could avoid it so we then headed to the Glades...er North Ridge. On North Ridge, Rime was in beautiful shape. Of course it seemed like we were on the North Ridge Chair for 10 minutes for a 30 second run down Rime. We did this a couple of times then decided to call it a day with a run down Double Dipper. What a surprise!

Double Dipper was better than Superstar! Because the Canyon Quad was not running, there was no one on Dipper. I took skiers right which was ankle high soft powder from the crest of Dipper to lower Downdraft. Unreal. Bill B went down skiers left and reported similar conditions. Howie went down the middle and said he hit a couple of areas where he skidded a little. Bill B and I decided Dipper was a do-over, so we headed to the K1 box for the lift up. We took one more run down Dipper and called it a day.

All told, in about 2 hours and 45 minutes we did 17 runs. We would have easily done 5 of 6 more had the Canyon Quad been running, as we did not touch Cascade, Downdraft or East Falls. Without question, it was just a great day to be on the hill. One of the best this ski season! Let it snow!