Total Vert So far: 17,915m
Tuesday night of this week saw the village get blanketed in over 30cms of blower. Understandably most people were pretty excited, and rumour has it even fresh tracks breakfast was sold out. As a massive pow snob, I was considerably disappointed on Wednesday to discover that a temperature spike overnight had turned the snow to cement all the way to 2000m, with a hefty rain crust below 1400m.
With a heavy heart I called Blackcomb Aviation to cancel the heli-drop that I had booked for Thursday. Although I was confident that I could find suitable terrain to ski given the heightened avalanche conditions, it didn't seem worth it to spend 100 bucks to ski flat, heavy, rained on pow. And what the ski out through the trees would be like was anyones guess.
So instead we decided on a standard and mellow route over the musical bumps. To our eternal surprise the snow had dried out and tightened up considerably over night, and we enjoyed sweet pow on Flute, Oboe and two laps on Cowboy.
As we traversed under Symphony lift the winds were howling, and we decided to take the lower approach up Lesser Flute rather than the standard cat track. Although this route is certainly more sheltered from the elements, the enjoyable skiing on the other side is considerably shorter, so I think I'll be sticking to the standard route from now on in all but the most heinous of conditions.
There was somewhere close to 800,000 people milling around on the back of Flute and the skin track up Oboe was like a highway. Luckily we were still able to find a nice fresh line down one of the apostles, and to our surprise there were no groups in front of us going up Cowboy. We set a skin track up the shorter but steeper lookers left hand side, and then boshed out 2 laps in short order. The snow on Cowboy was slightly shallower than the previous runs, but not as badly wind effected as you might have thought.
I decided most of my little edits have been a bit mellow recently, so I put some energy into this one. Enjoy!
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