February DAY, 2005, Crystal Mtn.

Last chance for the second (lift assisted) season. The day was warm - even hot at times - mostly sunny with a few big puffy clouds rolling by.<br><br>Hero snow every where we went. Campbell basin, Powder bowl, Green valley. Not spring corn yet but firm mashed potatoes. It almost seemed to groom itself through the day. Best part was not many people either had the day off or wanted to go there. That meant no lines at all. Hardly had to slow down to grab another chair all day.<br><br>By days end and after many laps my legs felt like Jello. Tired but satisfed. But when I got to the parking lot I found that I had a flat tire. &gt; Seems I parked right in the middle of a pile of nails left over from burning some old lumber - great. So after what seemed like a lengthy session of crawling under and around my truck the wheel was changed and I was on my way home. Oh well even that couldn't dampen a great day of skiing.

Urk. Something VERY similar happened to me in the Crystal lot last year postseason; I could already hear the hissing from a screwhole as we left and I knew my tour would end with a jack session. Even tho a flat tire was portended I decided I'd save fixing it for later because nothing would suck worse than pulling a muscle doinking with the tire and not even going skiing.<br>We were up there Saturday 4/9 and the temps were probably colder than you note. Most runs did soften up but mostly pleasurably so. Exceptions were Powder Bowl which stayed too frozen to be much fun, and Iceberg Gulch, which was taking sun full frontal and getting slooshy (fun on snowboard tho, helped me stay in fallline).<br>Next weekend should be just fine but stay on Rex and Queen and GV. Hi C had lots of rocks to avoid at top so it's troublesome up there even if it did soften up better. It's too bad tho that the extra weekend is tweaking what appeared to be a viable revival of the Ski Fest ???<br>On a quasi backcountry note we hiked to the King and dropped N side, which held slabby windpack powder up til a point where sun could hit it and turned it into ice and or not great corn. It was good that this powder was there because the alternative on all other aspects was very hard frozen plate, not worth any hike let alone this one, made more painful by the rocks top of Hi C to notch and being a poor-at-traversing snowboarder today. Reaching King from Silver Col via ridge appears to involve some carries over rocks. Ridge of King that goes W (toward resort) still seemed runnable either for upways or downways if you wended around a bit.