March 12, 2010

Winter has taken hold again.  I knew I shouldn’t have taken the van out of the garage.  It is now encased in snow.  I wonder if I will be able to chip it out by May.  The weekend was fine, but Monday brought high winds that kept the ski resort from running any of the good lifts.  Over three feet of snow arrived in Girdwood by Tuesday morning.  The resort promised limited operation, but it did us no good.  An avalanche closed the highway.  In town, we got almost a foot.  Several cars were stuck in our condo driveway.  We stayed home again.  The temperatures plummeted into the single digits. 

With Friday’s closure, Monday’s limited operation, and Tuesday’s road problems, we went five days without downhill skiing.  We did boost our cross country ski totals and the slow sticky snow probably added to our workout, but I was going through withdrawal.  We headed down for an early start on Wednesday.  The road was reasonably clear.  The avalanche that had crossed the road did not appear to be massive.  It was in a normal slide area that had already made it to the bike path for the first time in our experience just a couple weeks ago.  Tuesday it had managed to spill over the bike path.  From there, it crossed the road in two stretches of maybe a hundred feet across, but no more than a few feet deep.  It would not have been a real hazard to a person in a car, although it probably would have been hard on a car.

The ski resort, on the other hand, had a bigger problem.  An unusual slide came through a brushy area along the edge of the ski area and crashed through the upper parking lot which held a shed, some equipment, and some stacks of large drainage pipe.  All of this spilled through some trees which filtered out some of the bigger pieces.  The rest continued down through the mid parking lot, picking up some more equipment, another shed, and denting a storage container.  The slide appears to have stopped in the main parking lot down below.  They used their big equipment to dig out the parking lots.  This left tall debris laden snow piles along the edges of the parking lots.  They lost parking spaces and a connecting driveway.  The remaining connecting driveway feels like a tunnel.  Even the parking lots feel claustrophobic.  It was surreal.

I was also disappointed that the parking lots were incredibly full for a Wednesday.  With most of the mountain covered in over three feet of un-skied snow, people must have called in sick.  It is spring break so perhaps people were planning to take some time off with their kids.  We waited in about as long a line as we have ever seen for the upper lift, even took the singles line to get through quicker.  I am spoiled.  I can’t stand lines.  I was also pretty cold by the time we arrived at the top since the temperatures were down in the single digits.

For our first run, we decided on North Face.  It was the right call.  It wasn’t untracked, but it was lightly tracked.  While I was often crossing previous skiers’ lines, almost every turn landed in deep soft snow.  It was another dream run on the steep terrain.  The snow was moderately heavy so it wasn’t spraying up over our heads, but it hit me in the face once or twice.  It was another reminder that once you have figured out powder skiing, it requires less effort than skiing tracked up snow.  The run went too quickly and easily.  We seemed to be passing a lot of people along the way.  I was expecting to be waiting for Kris, but every time I paused, she was right there.  Soon we were back in the painful lift line.  

As we were riding up, we noticed that High Traverse had opened.  We decided to see if we could find some untracked over there.  I scoped out a line on the ride up.  The traverse seemed to be cut a little flat this time.  Normally, it requires a little bit of climbing, hiking, and poling, but most of it can be glided along a gentle slope.  We seemed to have been working much harder to get out there than normal.  This extra work wasn’t the worst thing in the cold as it kept us warm.  We were eventually rewarded with an untracked steep slope, although I chose a line previously skied by a single skier who made nice rounded tight turns.  I made my turns opposite the previous skier, completing a nice looking set of powder-8’s all the way down the slope.  Kris chose a clean slate along side.  My powder-8’s were reasonably visible from the lift for the rest of the day, the only set anyone had bothered to make in all that beautiful snow.

The rest of the day was spent in lift lines or skiing through the soft skied-up snow.  Thursday was a pleasant continuation, absent the crowds.  The parking lot was still pretty full, but racing accounted for some of the cars and the below zero temperature up high was discouraging many. 

The bumps were fun, some of the best I have seen at Alyeska.  After surviving Christmas Chute, we were rewarded with massive well-formed moguls on Jim’s Branch.  These looked like moguls at any eastern resort, but the troughs weren’t icy. 

We took only one run down Christmas Chute.  The visibility proved to be a problem.  The only way we could see was to wait for the snow pushed by our skis to flow down the hill ahead of us to provide some contrast.  The little rolling snow balls gave us clues to the locations of bumps and troughs.  When they ran smooth, we put a turn right in the middle of the moving snow.  As we got lower, the visibility improved, but the conditions got tougher.  We paused and looked up at a pair of skiers coming through the narrow part.  The one skier clearly didn’t belong on that steep terrain and soon crashed.  A pair of goggles began rolling downhill.  The terrain is so steep that the goggles kept going.  We sat there and watched the goggles roll hundreds of feet down toward us.  We decided to stop them if they got to us, which they did.  Then we were left with the dilemma of where to wait for this scary skier.  We climbed up on the wall to hide.

 I spoke to one of our Senators last week.  He called on an impromptu mini phone town hall.  It was a pretty cool concept.  I don’t know how many people were on the call, but it was probably at least dozens.  You pressed a button if you had a question and they put you in the queue.  When they got to you, your phone was taken off mute and you could ask your question.  I asked him what congress was going to do to prevent EPA from moving forward on regulating greenhouse gases under the existing mechanisms of the Clean Air Act.  His answer was reasonably satisfying.  At least he demonstrated an understanding of the issue.  I listened in on most of the other questions as well. 

We seem to have a full social life.  A friend has turned in his resignation and is moving to Portland to help his mother so we went to dinner this week with him and another friend to send him off.  We attended another gathering at a local brewery last night.  One of our close friends in that group had just turned in her resignation to make a slight career change.  Today, we have our friend from Fairbanks arriving.