Wow—what a day! Most lower-mountain lifts started spinning promptly at 9 this morning, with Roundhouse opening 10 minutes late. I made quite a few runs on Roundhouse this morning before Summit and Scott opened. My favorite run off Roundhouse was Tiegel Chutes—knee deep powder for most of the morning, and still great in the afternoon. Yellow trail was skied off by the time I got to it, but the snow was still soft. Sympathy Face offered up some nice turns as well.
Summit opened at 11:30 or so, and I let the crowds over there settle down for a few minutes while I got a couple of more quick laps on Roundhouse. I did a couple of runs on Summit—Pete’s Peril, which had some of the best turns of the day, and Deadtree, which, after some rubble at the top, was nice. I noticed mountain ops were prepping Scott around 12, so we headed over there and waited for about 30 minutes. We were, maybe, the 25th chair by the time the lift opened at 1. I was probably the 10th skier to go down Scott’s Chute, which was awesome! Untracked powder pretty much the whole way down, as long as you avoided the tracks left by others. It sure was great!
We went back up Scott to take a lap in the Lower 40 area, which was even better! Completely untracked the whole way down, enough new snow to not feel the bottom, and an awesome line through the trees made it the best run of the day. We went back for another run after we made it back up to Scott, but it was already tracked out.
After that, we did a couple of more runs on Summit—Palisades (skied off, but still super fun) and D-8 (not as good as other runs, but still good) to skier’s left of The Face (which had some great turns).
Visibility was not your friend most of the day, but if you stuck around trees, you could make your way down perfectly fine. The sun tried to peak out around 3 for a little while, but it’s snowing again at Alpine. Lines were not that bad today, the longest I waited was maybe 10 minutes.
Props to mountain ops and ski patrol for getting everything open today!
(You can view my stats for the day at Trace’s website.)