Lower Dream Maker. Notice the deep blue sky...Cold air coming.

Lower Dream Maker. Notice the deep blue sky...Cold air coming.

When I left the inn this morning around 8:45, the temperature in my car read 19. A nice brisk winter chill. I parked in the Bay 1 parking lot at the K1 base lodge, got my boots on, slipped on another layer of clothing, and walked over to the K1 gondola. The gondola line included your typical holiday faire...lots of college kids... Some grand parents with small children....some business types playing hooky from work. What was missing was a lot of locals. Figuring that the group of people I saw taking the gondola was going to hang around the K1 side of the mountain, when we reached the top, I decided to do the traverse over to Bear Mountain. I was appropriately rewarded.

At about 9:05, I was on my way down Bear Trap, through the terrain park. There was one other person on the trail. To my disappointment, the resort had spent the night grooming all of the fluffy powder that had fallen late in the day yesterday. While the surface was still very soft, it was not the powder run I was expecting. But hey... I have not skied in a week, so the groomers probably did my legs a favor.

On Bear Trap, I rode up and down several of the larger features in the park before heading down towards the Viper Pit, Lower Bear Claw, and the OL Chair. The Viper Pit was a little scratchy in places, although I was also a little tentative on this first run of the new year. Lower Bear Claw was nicely groomed. As I was the only one on it, I was able to pretty much carve edge to edge turns. Very sweet.

Outer Limits was quite literally under the gun today. Surface and tower mount snow guns were all in action blowing snow onto OL. The surface was fairly well bumped from the holidays. While the new snow made it soft, one run was enough for me under the guns today, as the temperature was beginning to fall. To complete the trifecta at Bear, my next run was down Wildfire. Upper Wildfire was not groomed. It was light fluffy snow on top of hard icy bumps. Quite skiable, but you needed to pay attention to your line, picking and choosing your spots along the way. Lower Wildfire was groomed and in great shape.

On my way out of Bear Mountain, I noticed the rope was down on lower Dream Marker. It just sucked me in.... Dream Maker was covered with huge snow making whales, deep crusty snow, and pockets of powder. The resort has obviously blown a lot of snow on Lower Dream Maker in preparation to turn it into a park. The snow whales were a lot of fun to ride up and down on, but the deep crusty snow was another issue all together. I was on my all mountain skis today. Every time I turned on the crusty stuff, I was cutting huge scars in the snow crust behind me. Once lower Dream Maker gets groomed out, it should set up for some nice cruising later on.

After a run down Cruise Control (nothing special) I did a few more runs on Bittersweet, Skye Lark and Super Star. All were in very nice shape. If we were not coming off the holiday period (there is a whole pile of work on my desk to catch up on), I probably would have stayed out and done some laps on the Superstar Chair. But, as it was, it was not a bad first ski day of the new year. With all of the snow on the mountain, there should be many more to come.

Oh...and the temperature.... it's been dropping al day. As I write this, it is a robust 5 degrees F on it's way to a forecasted -10 tonight. Brr...

Let it snow!