Crystal - 02/24 Friday the 13th?

Short Report - Partly/mostly cloudy up top early, nice sun late morning for the rest of the day. Snow? New
deep in places, wind scoured in places, wind blown in others. Great in PB, BP's and GV Bowl. Groomers nice
on non steep slopes, but steep pitches on LS and MIFB would have been great early, but were lumpy cut up
snow by the time I skied them. Lifts? CHex broken before opening (and all day), Bucket running for the first
hour or so - then a very very slow crawl for the folks stuck on it till they got off and then closed for the
day. Ouch!

Wordy report - Arrived extra early (I thought?) only third row on the CHex line up for another BIG! powder
day. Crowd kept arriving and when it was announced there would be no CHex, the lineup on the Gondy and Disco
was pretty big. Stood around hoping the big brain power would get CHex running - no such luck. So it was
Disco to SlowSilver to FQex to finally get to REX (which ran fine all day). There was significant line up
on Chair 6 early, but by late morning it was gone, which allowed for a number of nice runs in PB. So my day
ended up with runs from PB to MIFB with a final run of the day down Exterminator (challenging today).

Other - CB lodge had nasty looking pizza early, but reasonable when I stopped by late. Soups were Curry Thai
early and Tomato Bisque late. Crowds were not really to bad, no lift lines on REX and Chair 6 after the
morning rush. Never a line on CHex or The Bucket (ha ha). Pay lot not full, Car pool lot not full, lots of ultra
wide spaced rows in B and C which filled up most of the lots, so a fair crowd in the parking lots.
Drive up was happy, but kinda slow on the way down cause of a carefull lead car in the lineup. Hopefully Crystal
will get all their lifts fixed tonight, otherwise tomorrow morning will be painfull again. Hopefully what ever
went wrong at the sewage treatment plant will get fixed also - smelled bad in the A lot.

In addition to the ddk report we found some soft snow in Northway when it (finally) opened. Before that we cycled on GV with some decent snow. The lift lines there got a little long until NW opened. Otherwise no lines after the morning surge. I was kind of funny to see a long lift line on Discovery.
Interesting that the Crystal Mt website notifications make no mention of the lift troubles today. One in our party spent 90 minutes in line and on the gondy. I heard they were handing out day passes to the unfortunate customers.

Walked onto the gondola at 9:13 am  -- and after a few towers the lift lost power and we sat inside for 65 minutes. With Chinook also being broken, that meant that folks up top had GV and the Frontside all to themselves. During our wait, lift ops told us over the cabin's speaker that we were being evacuated and to sit tight. That meant if the Level 4 power failed, then we were to be roped off. It didn't come to that because eventually inched our way to the top via the lift's 2nd diesel backup. Patrol passed out 1 unrestricted ticket to each of us.

So we dinked around C6 for the rest of the day, hoping that the extensive control work in the South would wrap up. I remember the time as 2:58 pm when we came off the top of FQ and South went from hold to open! So up C6, through the mid gate and viola -- there it was -- all the 12" untracked you could ask for. We squeezed 1 more FQ-C6-South as the trees and creekbeds were giving it up. We exited out via Boondoggle which nobody had bothered to bother with.

So after a crappy start, the sunny day ended just great.