Before one of my laps on Boundary Chutes (untracked trees, steep but so deep you hardly need to turn to maintain safe speed) I'm on the cat track and this guy comes down from George's Thumb bowl talking about how he might have been dreaming, but could swear it was up to his waist at one point. His wife confirms. I think to myself, (a) that's ridiculous, they have to be messing with me, or (b) waist deep would be the most erotic snow experience of my life, so what if they're telling the truth? I decide to call an audible and check it out. When I get back to the top of the T-Bar, I cut over and take the Imperial lift to the top. It wasn't too windy, but blowing over the ridge into George's Thumb bowl. I start to believe the wind could actually make waist deep a reality. When I got to the other side of the ridge, the wind changed directions. I was overtaken by what I believe was the hardest gust of wind I've ever experienced. I stopped when the next pole marking my cat track disappeared into the whiteout, probably only 20 feet away. After about 30 seconds, which felt like an eternity, even with wearing a neck/nose gaitor, the windward side of my face was completely numb. I buried my face in my armpit - only to expose an unzipped pocket that I later discovered was unzipped and had a baseball sized ball of snow in it from this 30 seconds... I had a mini-panic attack thinking that the wind was not going to stop so I had to get back to the trees but I couldn't see to get down safely. I literally could not see past my skis in the whiteout but I decided to just go for it and drop in where I was.. and nearly took a fall into a 10 ft natural quarter pipe (the wind eventually let up). Once I did get my bearings I made it down just fine, discovering that it indeed was deeper, but not quite waist deep. That's just silly (although I did share the T-Bar with a girl who told me her little sister was over her belly button in Blue Sky the day before, and she seemed to be telling the truth). Lesson learned: the grass is not always greener. After that I had windburn so bad that the right side of my face actually peeled like a sunburn. Crazy.
I couldn't get up to the mountains in the weekend after Thursday, but was able to head up the following weekend. On the 4th Ryan and I headed to Salida on Friday night to use our free day at Monarch (thanks Gems card!). It had been snowing by the foot in the Sawatch range all week, and I had heard good things about Monarch, so I was very excited. Monarch did NOT disappoint. When we woke up on Saturday they were reporting 6" of fresh overnight, so we hurried up to get as many fresh tracks as possible. Holy cow. Even the main runs were fairly untracked. After several laps with Ryan, I headed off to the hike-to terrain to see what kind of trouble I could get into. After about 10 minutes of hiking I was simply too excited and just dropped into what I could see hadn't really been touched. It was like sand dune fresh powder up to the knees. I was beside myself! I had to stop to take some pictures to remember it. Ex:
After my first lap through this goodness I skied back over to Ryan to give him a chance to enjoy the powder. The long story short there is that one day in the future he will look back on the experience with excitement... but that might be a while. I think next time when it's that deep he'll bring his skies instead of snowboard. Ahh well. The whole Monarch set can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/brett_burch/sets/72157616676291062.
The next day I went up to Eldora after hearing how good the snow was up there in the glades. I skied with a friend from my Avy 1 class, and was not disappointed yet again. I had heard about how terribly icy the skiing at Eldora usually is, but that was definitely not a problem after a foot of fresh snow. We were able to find some decent stashes in the glades even a few days after the storm. Note to self: check out Bryan Gully at the bottom of Bryan Glades again... that was the first time this season I had skied two days in a row, so I was tired on Monday, but it was really worth it.
This season is finishing on a really good note. I'm going to be climbing the next 3 Saturdays, but if I can myself out for some more skiing in May or June, I'll be really happy with how this season finished.
