March 13, 2005, Paradise

We didn't bother getting up too early given the low FL and forecast for winds hopefully diminishing during the day. The wind was whipping in the parking lot when we arrived late morning. The snow was starting to soften a bit as we headed out around 11. We headed up into Edit Creek Basin to avoid the bootpacked main route upwards. A few guys skiing out complained of 40-50MPH gusts and seemed to feel it wasn't worth sticking around.

We headed up a bit to the east of the main climbers route, finding only a few brief bare heather spots. The snow started getting more crunchy at about 7200K, so we did a some short 700vf laps on corn (and sometimes corn flakes). There's a good deal of ash/dirt on the snow surface where we skied, but one nice advantage of early corn is no tree pollen yet! The wind steadily diminished through the afternoon, and it became quite pleasant. By 4, things were getting crispy so we headed back down, finding more nice turns with some attention to where the solar aspects were, and fast traversing in the shady areas. We saw a few other skiers out and about, but for the most part it was pretty quiet in our little piece of Paradise.

Boy is it thin up there, but there's still some skiing to be had right from the lot.