The past week or two, Stevens Pass has been getting hit hard with snow…finally! I was able to get up two times and play in some deeper stuff. I think I can say I met my season goal of getting better at riding in pow, but I’ve still got a lot more to learn.
Snow clouds
Saturday driving up to the mountain was crazy. No one was ready for the snow. All season the roads have been pretty dry up to the mountain-Saturday was a different story. First off, there was a huge line of cars. Second, at a certain elevation point, traffic came to a standstill on the four-lane road. The roads had a solid layer of ice and everyone was spinning out. Since cars couldn’t move to the side of the road, people were just putting chains on wherever their car ended up stopping. It was a free-for-all.
Once I finally got to the mountain, I took a couple runs by myself on the front and then headed over to the back thinking that it was going to be amazing. But there were so many people up on Saturday hitting it that moguls were already starting to form. I took off for the frontside after one run.
A couple runs later I ran into Julie. We spent the rest of the day finding good, relatively untracked snow. I definitely got a lot of practice with traversing. Sometimes it felt like I was on a roller coaster, the rollers were so steep and fast on some of the traverses, it was fun.
April snow at Stevens Pass
There were so many people getting the goods that every single chair was full on the lifts. But almost every place we went away from the main runs was good. The snow was deep, soft, and floaty.
There were a lot of natural kickers and -while we didn’t hit them-we saw a group of skiers come through and hit them with lots of style…maybe the Salomon Jib Academy was taking a break from the park.
For one run we headed up the Seventh Heaven chair. Getting off of that chair always freaks me out a little bit, but on Saturday, it was smooth and easy to one-foot it. I guess everything is good on a pow day.
I’m getting a lot better at figuring out what line might lead me to a flat and leave me stuck in the snow and digging out. Always good information to know. I also worked on leaning down the hill and keeping my knees soft…something that helped me a lot with keeping my board underneath me.
There was so much fresh snow it made for awesome riding and we were spent by two in the afternoon.
