1/4/15 - Stevens

Well if they were all full-priced days, my pass would be paid-off now. Yet another long day up Hwy 2, but this time I didn't have to drive, opting to catch a ride outta town at dawn with friends instead of rolling up for the afternoon by myself. AM temps were reasonable, clinging to the mid-20s, with light snow falling throughout the morning. But around 12:30 it was like Mother Nature hit a switch and the snow started falling at 1+ inches an hour. Just as I reached the bottom of the backside on the last lap of the day back there, the power went out at the resort. So we waited... and waited... and waited, for about 20 mins for ops to fire-up the backup generator and get us out of there. As we stood around at the bottom of the backside, the wind noticeably began to change direction. By the time I reached the top of Skyline to slip my way down to the car, the precipitation became mixed. Oddly enough, it was still snow at pass level and remained snow all the way down to Scenic except for one pocket of rain right about 3k' on the west side. Traffic was slow due to multiple accidents and spin-outs - took us 3 hours in total to make it home.

The riding was surprisingly good. The new snow freshened up the skier-packed ungroomed zones and by the end of the day, the "off-piste" was riding better than the groomers. Free refills were available all afternoon and we did a little more exploring around the fringes of the resort. For the record, the trees skier's right off Big Chief are not enjoyable right now and both the entrances and exits to Tye Bowl are borderline too sporty to make the few good turns inbetween worth the effort. The chutes on the Tye Stick end of Cowboy Ridge are passable and fun, as is Hollywood Bowl to the backside. The trees are still too tight (and the creeks too open) to make exiting from Rooster Comb feasible. Grace Lakes, Wenatchee and Highlands bowls don't have close to enough snow to offer a passable exit (nor does it look like they will any time soon :'()

Crowd was large, but well distributed. I believe the parking lots were full not long after 10am. I never waited in more than a 3 minute lift line all day (except for when the power went out) and several times just rode right on to the chair. Now if we could just get some more snow...