Jan 9 - a day on the slopes

It was a day of skiing on piste -- on trails. All the high alpine bowl areas are closed due to extreme avalanche danger. I did some reading on it and apparently there is a hard crust down below with layers of unstable snow on top. Hopefully they will deem it safe to knock some of the potential avalanches down and run the high alpine lifts. Normally we ski most of the day from the Whistler Peak and Harmony chairs, into bowl areas that don't have runs, per se. We normally warm up and end our days on the groomed and ungroomed runs mid to bottom. Some of the high alpine at Blackcomb was open for part of the day yesterday so at some point we might head over there -- taking the new peak-to-peak gondola, if I can convince Sandy to try it.

We've seen more snow at this time of year ... and less. It snowed yesterday, and overnight, and will do so today ... so the base continues to build. It's advertised as 61 inches, but they measure that in an unexposed place where there is no skier traffic. Unexposed means that the wind doesn't blow the snow away. It's truly a base measurement, in that after a few sunny days it goes down -- settling and sublimation, but that doesn't mean that there is 5 feet of snow under you where you're skiing. Two feet of base at Vail tends to be more skiable snow than 5 feet at Whistler ... except, that is, in the alpine bowls.

Some of our normal groomed runs, like Bear Paw and Tokum have not been touched/grooed this year. While they have lots of snow, it's rough going. Franz's was in good shape, having been groomed top to bottom in the last few days with little traffic. It's not very busy, whether due to the economy (bad), the snow (medium), the closed areas due to avalanche danger, or the bad publicity due to the Excalibur Gondola accident. Like the mug stated that I used to have before someone "disappeared" it in Philadelphia - a bad day skiing is better than a good day at work. Of course that holds true for every day now .... unless I'm thinking of that evening working in the sewage pit ... no, there were a lot of work days much worse than that ! Although it was sh*tty work, we (David, Jeffrey and I) did accomplish something ... teamwork !

My PC says 10:37 but of course it's only 7:37, just starting to get light outside and an hour away from the lifts starting up. It's fairly warm -- freezing at valley level and -4C in the alpine -- so it will be pleasant skiing. A little fresh snow on top of that hard pack ... some grooming ... hopefully, hopefully they'll work on the avalanche prone areas today ... and the week will build from good to excellent. Clearing weather and some sun are coming.

There's a new sushi restaurant here in Creekside so we walked over there last night after doing some grocery shopping. We looked it over, declined, and went to Boston Pizza where we mostly demolished a Greek pizza. It was good, but couldn't hold a candle to that pizza that we had close to Mariadella's in November. Perhaps we'll go into the Village tonight and have sushi there -- a tried and true place, up to the same standard as our place in Florida.

That's about it ... or at least all that comes to mind.

Oh -- one bit of trivia -- when I pulled my last-year's ski ticket out of my pocket to replace it with this-year's, I realized that it had the exact same dates -- Adult 8 Day, Begins 01/09/2008 Expires 01/17/2008 valid 8 of 9 days -- well, the year is different. How's that for consistency ... or boring ... take your pick.

Some not-so-good news -- Marda Schropp's Dad passed away. Marda is a friend in Philadelphia. We heard this from Mariadella in an email this morning. It was not unexpected -- I understand from Sandy that he was in kidney failure -- but that does not make it any easier. Our thoughts are with Marda.