Feb 7th - We had to get creative as the weather was just not co-operating. The previous day it had gotten really warm and the snow had turned to mush on the southern aspects, so we needed to find north-facing, shaded aspects this day. We tried a couple of runs in the trees next to the main upper lifts just to be sure, but the sun was heating up the snow and the skiing wasn't great there. It was too south-facing, despite there being plenty of untouched lines.
Thankfully there are great north-facing trees to the skier's left of the mountain so I decided to move the group there. This was definitely the right move and here the snow was staying much colder. It had been 3 years since I had last skied in that zone so I needed to get my bearings on the first run. We skied a line I was familiar with, using Gaia maps to record the run and map the all important traverse line back to the resort.
Once the traverse line was established, we could push further in and ski more turns on the next runs. We found some even more-open trees as we pushed further to the skier's left. I think we made about 3 runs in that zone before we called it quits for the day. We made the most of the tough conditions and still had some great turns. This was a great start to the skiing in the final zone for the trip and we had 4 more days to come.
