November 27, 2006, Snoqualmie, Summit Central

I've been at this for a while, and I'll have to tell you that I'm having trouble remembering anything so amazing. The snow was bottomless, light, cold, with none of the speed problems that Charles spoke about a couple days ago. The weather was perfect, no wind, 23F all day, and good visiblility between snow squalls, with occasional shots of sun.

Brenda and I arrived at Summit Central around 9:00 AM, after passing up the temptation for a bit of lift skiing at Summit West. Right away I had my doubts, as the trail breaking above the condos towards Silver Nugget was really tough. But we persevered, and finally reached the top of Silver Fir lift. Like Charles we had intended to go a bit further and maybe check out the coverage near Nordic Pass, but there was no way. Too deep. In some places I was able to push a ski pole into the snow nearly to my elbow. At that point we thought we may have to head over to the lifts at West. The first turn down Hog Wild ended any thoughts of that. It was nothing but bouncy bounce all the way to the bottom. With a skin track in place we did several more runs, three runs under the lift and a final run down Outback. Just unbelievable. Even on the golf course area just above the condos we were bouncing our way to the car.

A quick pit found a layer at around 18" that failed at tap test of 13. Not very cohesive though, especially the top 6". Very consistent snowpack down to the rain crust at approximately 30" or so.