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Thanks!!







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And of course, Buffy ripping:

Good god that stuff in Firebreak was heavy. I was hearing that the storm hit upside down, 19% windloaded on top of 12% snow. Yup, you pretty much had to point it. Which can be cool sometimes, but it was a lot of effort for a modest amount of goods. After we split up, SF and L2R and I headed over to Avy Bowl on the California side for steeper, more rideable (it seemed less heavy there) snow and much faster laps. It was delicious and fun. Riding in the trees was a mandatory for visibility later in the day. Then we heard thunder claps ... and though we were below treeline, all of our legs were fried so we decided to call it. So much for the hot tub party eh?

So yesterday (2/26) I wet catboarding on the terrain behind Squaw Valley and Sugar Bowl. Basically, if you're at the top of Granite Chief looking at the valley behind Squaw, all those little alpine bowls are private property where Pacific Crest Snowcats run a cat operation. The trip was a bday present from all my buddies. My camera ran out of batteries after only a few shots, but if I get photos from the other people in the group I'll put up a TR.

Back to the point of the thread - I was seeing the start of sun crust formation on many aspects. Where the trees were exposed to sun and heat, pollen was starting to stick to the suncrust, forming that crackable velcro snow that is so horrible to ride. The only rideable stuff was north facing aspects.

On north aspects, the snowpack had settled out to a pretty even density on the upper 65 cm before hitting a different layer of older stuff. Bonding felt good with density increasing deeping in the snowpack, and somewhere down toward the bottom we found some sugar that was starting to round out.

The riding was good - heavy heavy snow, pretty much mandatory to be really setback on the board. No crusts on northern aspects yet though, fun powder turns still to be had in some places ...

Went up Tallac today and was surprised by how good the snow was. The skin track on sweat hill is superb, getting to it is a slight challenge. Several parties were skinning up the gut of North Bowl, looked like a decent track there.

High elevation north facing treed slopes are pretty dang fun.

Saw some good looking fresh lines back in Deso.

SE ridgetop winds were pretty strong and kept it crunchy at the 10k' top of Mt.Houghton (next to Mt.Rose) today. Pretty dang cold too. Once off the top the corn was pretty nice.

The true Bronc0 chutes off Houghton's North side are done for the year. The short-but-steep False-Bronx will be good for at least a month still.