Season continued one more day

Due to a nice dumping of snow on the 17th, skiing was to be had on the morning of the 18th. I tried to get up the hill on the evening of the 17th, but was turned back on no-shine hill due to snow and ice that defeated my two wheel drive. But on Saturday morning, Jessica and I got up to the trails for some good skiing.

Good coverage early on the trails


Woods were nice but sticky


Dork-grin me and action Jessica at point A


It was really sticky for me going up, so I mostly ran, coming back down it warmed up and I had some glide.


Jessica and I at the top of the meadow


The snow was great. I wish I did not stick as much on the way up, Jessica was strangely immune from this issue. The way back was pretty fun though, and the meadow was great. There were probably 10 skiers out by noon, with no snowshoe or dog tracks at all. The coat tree down to the bottom was going fast as we were leaving, but we successfully snuck in one more day.

Easter Skiing...Awesome!

It has snowed more in April than I think it did in all of January and February combined. Late March wasn't so bad either.

We finally got out in one of these spring snowstorms to check out the skiing. In the past, I would go up pretty easily by myself when it did this, but with the new addition to the family, it's not quite as easy as it used to be. This time, the family came along, despite the daunting weather conditions. It was a lot of fun.

At the Coat Tree (point B). Mila's just about to fall asleep!


There was anywhere from about 12" to 16" of new snow on the trails, depending on where you measured. The upper parts of the trail had the most, of course. We never hit a single thing with our skis, but did feel the rocks below while skiing up the front hill. Once we were a little ways past the coat tree, we could feel the old snow base underneath...pretty solidly frozen. It would have actually been groomable, but the heck with that!

I'm one "switchback" above Dina, who is just past point J.

You can see that the fencing is down at point A (the banner is still up and looking good), and other sections of fencing were pulled down by the heavy snow. I saw no evidence of wands or bamboo poles in the meadow. It'll be a while before we see those again. We saw only a couple of medium-ish aspens down by the bonfire meadow, by the upper shortcut.

Mila and Dina at point A...you can barely see the ski area in the background. Note the fencing is all pulled down.

Here are just a few more pics of our outing:

up near point L...we had to stop for a break and since Mila didn't have eye protection,

we didn't take her out into the meadow

Mila made a good ski companion

still snowing hard out in the meadow about 2pm on Easter Sunday

A nice birkebeiner report

As some club members know, this year I (tarik) decided to not train but for a few times and then go out and do all the races I could. The not training was due to slightly suboptimal snow conditions in feb and march, but mostly due to fun things like the new baby and not so fun things like having to actually go to work to get paid. I think I raced more times in 2009 than I trained. No big deal, I was able to do a bunch of fun races and was able to race my way into shape so I did a 30k and 40k skate race and had fun. I am still three race reports behind, I may get to them before winter 2009-2010 starts, but in the meantime, please go check out this race report from the american biekebeiner.

Sean, the author, is a pal of a pal of mine in Iowa. His report is spectacular! As is his preparation, or lack thereof. Every time I think something like, "Man the snow kind of sucked this year for training" I need to remember to think first of our midwestern brethern scraping around on a 200meter patch of snow for training. So in this spirit instead of slightly suboptimal, I have revised the 2008-2009 Los Alamos official snow conditions to Spectacular, yet not Specf*&kingtacular.

Note that his race report is in 4 parts. I know long rambling race reports, and this my friends is a class A long rambling race report. Great stuff, enjoy:

part 1
part 2
part 3
part 4