March is rad. I love March. It’s snowing, it’s sunny, days are getting longer and the riding is good. We had a friend from Florida fly in last saturday and after a 40″ day at the resort we led him to the backcountry. I think, sometimes, we forget just how good we have it up here.
Nothing like watching a Floridian shred powder turns, smiling ear to ear to remind us how amazing Alaska is.
Welcome to AK Dave!
During the first storm of the week, we got suckered in by a blue hole and toured up Marmot. The weather moved in and attempted to keep us off the ridge. Figuring we would just ski the skin track down, we were pleasantly suprised with a 15 minute window of absolute blue sky white snow heaven. Nearly 8-10 of fresh and deeper in the gullies.
Yes Please!
How could anyone resist the sucker hole in conditions like this? Never got any indicators of instability this day. Oh what a difference one day makes….
Hatcher Storm Skiing?
Ullr sayeth…let there be VIZ!
On wednesday we toured up conservative slopes in storm number two. This storm came with 50 mph East winds. The weather cleared in the early afternoon, at least in our location. While the skiing was pretty decent, we kept it conservative, as even on low angle east slopes we were getting shooting cracks and whoomping. Hey, there’s well over a foot of fresh in spots, give it a day. The report today was no viz and hollow south slopes. J.P. informed me that the fat looking south slopes were actually pretty thin new snow on top of multiple crusts…on top of sugar.
As an additional heads up, there’s been two slides in the past two weeks. Neither were very big, but both were on northerly facing aspects (NE and NNE to be precise)…one a wind slab in El Dorado Bowl and the other was skier triggered off the lower skin track of Bald Ridge. Our friends just had a close call in Thompson Pass and had two partial burials. Hatcher is certainly not Valdez but there’s slide potential for sure. Stay safe.
Jared and Cody Dog share a line
The freshies are quite nice right now and the snow fell the way we want…warmer to colder (very cold today). As of this writing the Marmot station is reporting -6.2 F. It’s cold out there and the weather is predicted as mostly cloudy until at least monday. Maybe we’ll get a nice inversion and let’s hope the wind will stay low.
