It was a slow start today, as the faithful waited until the softening window to arrive for the full festivities.  There was a high cloud cover that lasted until at least 11:30 AM, which helped extend the quality of the pack until later in the day.  As anticipated, the Bass Highway had melted off, leaving a solid 500′ of bare cat track to traverse.  I tried to sneak a little extra out of the vestiges, but ran out of snow and, because I did not want to take my skis off yet again, I opted to just give my skis a stone grind on the way to the last section out to the Tram.   Peruvian Gulch still had threads to get to the bottom, but they are tenuous and tricky at best, and as the snow got stickier, the difficulty factor increased significantly.  Tomorrow, look for still good cover on the higher elevations, with good grooming up there, but seriously minimal machine work is the rule below the Little Cloud chair.  The crews have done a great job of getting the best out of the hill, finding snow from stashes from the early season snow making, and I am amazed at how well they have kept the quality up this far into the melt off.  It has been great to see all the costumes and flair folks are bringing to the hill as the party atmosphere escalates.   Space Turtle was playing on the Plaza for the gang, slamming out some funky R&B, which got some folks dancing in ski boots. Fun stuff, and a great party scene for these last days of the season.  It should be clear in the morning, with the break going off around 10:00 AM for starters.  The Grooming will be offering some good cold granular to start, but the soft sorbet feel is soooo nice and worth the wait.   IBBY!!!

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 26th, 2013 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Snow Reports. 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.