Ideally I’d have a picture of this day at Timberline but I forgot the camera today. So there. You’ll just have to imagine 208 inches of snow at Timberline. Snow’s stacked up so high on the roadsides that it’s like driving through a tunnel of snow. Addie-the-car motored right on up Timberline Road this morning easy as could be. She handles more like a SUV than the Mighty Subaru did. But steady, and I’m getting used to the slightly larger, slightly higher ride. Today was a good test of her ability to handle windy snow conditions, and she did well.
Packed powder conditions this morning. Drier powder, and about five inches of it in places. We started out with heavier wind and snow first thing in the morning, but down in the tree runs things weren’t too bad. There’d been enough snow to drift and fill in a lot of bumps, and at first it was floaty and easy to glide on, rather than hard and icy.
That changed as more skiers arrived. Two hours after we’d started, the powder was pretty much chundered up, the bumps were back on the runs, and my fingers were freezing. Good thing I didn’t have the camera, really, because my fingers would have been even colder. At one point I pulled my fingers into my palms to get the full effect of the hand warmers–I’m thinking my next step will be to get a pair of mittens.
But hey–deep snow. Pretty snow. Icicles on fir trees, blowing drifts of powder snow, powdered sugar snow in places but overall nice, soft snow. Glad I waxed the skis last week because it was a real waxstripper of a day–have to wax before our next outing which won’t be for a week and a half. Next weekend is Norwescon, no time to ski. And then I’ll have the school ski day after that.
In any case, there’s nothing quite like skiing down a short sharp pitch into a brisk biting wind that snaps at the open skin between the face mask and the goggles. A real wake-me-up, that is. And today was a fun bouncy day on the slopes, because the thing about powder of the type we get here in the western Cascades? It bounces as you bash down the slope, especially with a small amount of speed. Doesn’t take a lot, doesn’t need to be crazy fast, but with the right amount and type of powder, I can feel like a real crazy skier whilst working a really mellow slope. Then I can watch the crazy kids doing 360s and somersaults while serenely gliding uphill in the chairlift.
Works for me.
