Beautiful Sunshine – Great Snow and a little bit of left over Powder

Before I write too much, I should mention we received around 20cm of snow in the previous 24 hours (would have been mentioned if I did a report for yesterday). Unfortunately I didn’t make it up yesterday, because the snow is quality and it would have been awesome !!

I did go up today, and spent most of my time on Blackcomb, with only an afternoon trip across the P2P and then a slushy run down to the village for my time on Whistler. I was really surprised as to how good the fresh snow was, great powder ! and the air temperature was cold enough to maintain it’s good quality through most of the day. It was sunny, and the sunshine was hot, so by the end of the day, the powder had become a bit solar radiated and therefore a bit heavy – but still a lot of fun. There isn’t much better than powder in sunshine Also the Blackcomb Glacier didn’t get opened yesterday, so today it was full of powder. I always enjoy the glacier, and today it was basically as good as it gets.

Whistler and Black Tusk

A bit of a generic picture, but you can see it was a glorious day. I also added a few more pictures in the photo gallery.

For a bit of other generic (but important) information – On Blackcomb Mt. – Magic, Crystal and Catskinner chairlifts were closed. I presume Crystal will open if they cannot open Glacier Express on any particular day. I also noticed that a few chairs seemed to be running a bit below full speed (Jersey Cream was slow because it was running on diesel for a while), this is probably an easy way to save a few dollars in operating costs (a bit like how they close the alpine lifts at 3pm rather than 3:30pm like they have done in previous seasons).
Also, Glacier Creek Lodge was closed today, so the only place to get food on Blackcomb is Rendezvous and Horstman Hut (since Crystal Hut has been closed for a while).

Overall, the runs are still in great shape. The upper mountain was soft packed, while the lower was a little frozen first thing in the morning but softened up nicely by around noon. Good coverage almost everywhere, with all the ski-outs to the valley still open. Even Sunset Boulevard, which is the ski out from the bottom of 7th Heaven looked to still have good coverage (I looked from the Peak2Peak Gondola). Normally by now we are reduced (or almost reduced) to only a few options to ski down – quite remarkable since the season was a little on the light side (snow-wise). I guess we were helped by the colder than normal temps which assisted snow making earlier, and is now preventing to much snow from melting. I did find a few of the cat-tracks were a little bit hard to ski, with the snow being packed down into that edge grabbing kind of snow (particularly the Rescue Road, which is the road out of the Blackcomb Glacier).

The mountains are empty, and I was able to ski straight onto every chair. The only exception was Solar Coaster which had a small line – mainly people lapping the terrain park.

Don’t forget the Festival starts this weekend, and they are building the Big Air jump at the base of Whistler – so if you are in town, check it out !

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 7:12 pm and is filed under Snow Reports.