Clear, slightly overcast – good snow and visibility

Today was a another good day – visibility was great, even though the sun was hiding behind a cloud layer. The snow is maintaining good form, although I found the lower mountain on Blackcomb had a lot of hard packed / icy patches which I was surprised to see.
The lower mountain of Whistler doesn’t seem to be have these problems (and today was my first day on Blackcomb for a while). That being said, the snow quality on Upper Blackcomb is superb, with lots of soft snow around.
The main groomed runs still have that ‘hard’ base from the early season, but most of the lesser used runs are fine. It is weird to be skiing a half foot of powder, and to feel a hard base underneath. Normally Whistler is a soft base……

It was pretty cold at times, even though it was officially warmer (-10) than the last few days (-15), somehow it felt a bit colder to me. Maybe it was the slight wind that caused that ….

I didn’t end up skiing that much, due to – firstly Glacier Express broke down, and then Excelerator did as well. So we had to ski to the bottom of Wizard chair to get back up the mountain. When we were in the Wizard line, it ALSO broke down, and we thought ‘forget this’ and headed to Merlins for something to eat and a drink (it was after lunchtime). Well 1 drink turned into a few and by the time we headed out, all the chairs were running again, but we were in no condition to do much skiing.

I heard later it was an electrical problem, possibly the feed from the province grid, which was causing problems with the lifts. Unconfirmed.

The forecast looks promising, especially for the Presidents week crowd. The snow is good, and the temps are supposed to stay low. There is even some snow in the forecast, how much, who knows, but even a little here and there will result in some nice skiing.

Side note: Recently I have set up a page for booking accommodation in Whistler, which I would like anyone thinking about coming here to at least check out, as for plain old accommodation, it seems to offer some of the lowest prices around (no packages with lift tickets, lessons though unfortunately). I do make a small commission on any booking, but the final price to you is the same as booking elsewhere. So it helps me out and costs you the same or less as booking from another website.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 4:58 pm and is filed under Snow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.