April 27, 2007, Earl Peak, N.Fk.Teanaway

Not all that good. Stopped by shady snow piles about 2 miles from Beverly trailhead, although road mostly bare. A monster truck had tried to drive through the shady piles during the day but only got about 10 feet. Snow soft even in the morning due to cloud cover. From Bean Creek basin skinned up to Earl's SE ridge then up the ridge to top (still good coverage on the ridge). Surface snow was very wet - squeeged lots of water out of the skins. First skied 1400 feet down S slopes of Earl into Standup Creek drainage. Top 500 feet was very nice (frozen enough to stay on top), but the rest was deep slush, 18" in a lot of places. There would have been scary slide activity if steeper, and if it had not been overcast would have been worse too. Then back up SE ridge and skied the main west side chute of Earl. Similar story, the top was OK (through steepest part) but then deep slush. The worst part of that run was that coverage seemed to be a bit low, and with the almost bottomless slush made us concerned about plunging through to rocks. We stayed skier's left of the creek all the way out. Silver lining was that there was enough snow on the lower trail to ski all the way to the trailhead bridge. Bottom line is that there was no Teanaway miracle corn today, I guess due to continuous cloud cover and thus lack of refreezing at night. Worst snow I've had in the Teanaway area.