It was puking snow in Banff last night at midnight, when I went to bed. I had spent the past two hours tuning my skis, excited for the morning to come. The forecast called for clear skies, for the first time in a week of fog and snow storms. Over half a meter of snow fell on the local resorts, and I planned to be first in line when the lifts opened.
I got off the Sunshine gondola at Goat’s Eye mountain, just as the lift was opening to the public. I’ve done so many times in the past five years on powder days, usually to be rewarded with fresh tracks of fluffy knee-deep powder everywhere I ride. Not today though.
Despite it’s having dumped snow every day this week, mother nature threw a curve ball, and there was a quick melt-freeze cycle before Friday morning. My first run on Goat’s Eye involved scraping across dust on crust: about 2cm of dust on what felt like half a meter of crust. It wasn’t the porcelain type that can develop on the Goat, but it wasn’t particularly pleasant for my fat powder skis. One run was enough, and I jumped back on the Gondola to test the snow on reliable old Mount Standish.
Standish was much better, as it tends to be. The snow just accumulates on it’s south-easterly aspects, which also happens to be a stunningly beautiful place to ski first thing in the morning, as the sun rises behind Mt. Assiniboine. Maybe it’s the early sun that hits those slopes that softens the snow in the morning. In any case, I found some fresh gnar close to the ski area boundary on a steep little run called Laryx. The last time I was there, it was a rock garden, but there is finally enough snow that I didn’t bottom out once, and I was ripping fairly hard.
Unfortunately Laryx is only long enough to get about four turns in before you hit the cat track. A short jaunt over to Strawberry Face provided a few more powder turns before returning to the corduroy. I ended up repeating that line about 5 times, which only took around 40 minutes (yeah, it’s short), before hoping over to Continental Divide to see what the big mountain had to offer. It offered mostly wind-packed snow, with shallow pockets of loose powder between crusted moguls. A couple of runs there was enough, and I thought I’d check out that old chestnut, The Shoulder, which often hides a little powder oasis outside of the mainstream slopes.
Today The Shoulder was totally wind-blasted, the tracks of yesterday’s powder-hounds entombed in white marble, mocking me, and pounding my thighs all the way down as I negotiated the death-cookies. I decided to bear right, and skate back to the Goat’s Eye area, where I boarded Banff Ave and skied out to the parking lot. Maybe tomorrow conditions will be better.
