Friday was a real epic day at Jackson, we skied over 20k feet in powder, trees and bowls. As always the Tram is one hell of an experience, this was my first trip to see the new Tram. 100 people, 9 minutes up, 4,139 feet of vertical! This new tram is a great improvement over the old 52 capacity tram. We hit a few of the classics including: South Hoback, Alta shoots, Laramie Bowl Pepi's, and Dick's Ditch.
Thanks to the Lewis' and David for use of their transceivers, all of us who skied the hobacks had transceivers. I also gave a quick training session for those who had the equipment.
We grabbed some chow at the Snake River Brewery, everything was great but the over cooked Ribs...
By Saturday, Juan had met all the employees. If a name tag said Peru, he spent 15 minutes chatting it up.
Skiing was great, no fresh snow, but we tried Saratoga (that had a layer of crust), Moran woods, Solitude Gully, but once we found the snow in Riverton Bowl, we had a hard time leaving! We skied until Eddie was falling more than turning ;). Jackson Hole just doesn't get the skiing pressure that a ski resort on the old I-70 corridor does. We had no trouble finding great snow in bounds all day Saturday.
Late in the afternoon, we rode up with a local ski bum. (Well local as of 3 weeks.) We talked about the forecast, and he said stick a map in the freezer. You wouldn't believe how well that worked earlier this season!
After a few white russians, Small Buddy insisted on betting on anything and everything... The weather report called for another blue sky day, no snow in the forecast. The bet... Small Buddy and Little Mike, 20,000 vertical feet by noon, Tucker and Eddie, 40,000 by close... I'm surprised there were no bets made on the game...
Sunday morning we woke up to a surprise of 1" of snow in the parking lot.
January 11, 2009
I seem to remember typing the weather report yesterday. Either I have a serious case of memory loss, or the National Weather Service had NO IDEA we were about to receive a foot of snow overnight.
Our snow report was 12", and Small Buddy was hung over! The bet was off...
This is a good day for avalanche gear, and everyone had it... The tram opened 1/2 hour late because of all the bombing. We headed for Saratoga Bowl again, a couple of Fantastic Epic Pow runs!
What a great weekend! I'm so disappointed to have to come back! But Monday morning we caught the first flight back to Denver, only to find 6" in some parts of Denver!
With all the snow we got while we were up there. I'm not surprised that the snowpack was unstable. The avalanche danger was considerable all days we skied. We did find after a warm up Friday afternoon on the lower elevations of the mountain, the snow Sunday was ready to slide. Luckily it was heavy enough, we only had trouble with sluffing. One ski instructor told us about a 36" drop of snow which the storm ended in rain. This sets up a pretty unstable snowpack. This probably contributed to the two in-bounds deaths at Jackson Hole so far this year.
2 comments:
Where are the pictures of Karyn?!
Wow. Look at all that snow. Looks fun!
Hope you all had a great holiday and fun birthday :)
love us
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