Kirkwood

We didn't even bother to check the forecast, as we knew Kirkwood was going to be great. Basile came with us, and we did the drive in his truck. We got to Chair 6 a little before 9am and took a warm up run on Chair 5, as we were supposed to meet a friend at 9am. After waiting for 15 minutes, we hoped on the chair and went up, eager to ride the fresh snow. They hadn't received that much snow over the course of the night, but yesterday's tracks were somewhat filled in.

After a couple of laps on Chair 6 and one run in Palisades, we decided to head over Chair 10 for some turns. We all concurred that Palisades we get the least tracks in it, and would still be ripe for the picking in the afternoon. It must have been cold during the night, as the snow was lighter than what had fallen the day before. We cranked out a run down Eagle Bowl and hoped on Chair 2, intent on getting to the backside. The backside hadn't opened yesterday, and we knew the snow would be untouched. On the ride up, we scouted out the terrain; it was wide open, but we didn't spy any steeps, which was what we were after. So we decided to head down Larry's Lip and try and drop into the steep face of Timber Peak.

Were we wanted to go was out of bounds, so we went further along the ridge and ended up dropping into One Man Chute. It was a short but nice run. The call was made to have an early lunch and then head over to Palisades, as it still looked relatively untouched.

And that's just what we did, back to Chair 6 for the 15 minute traverse out to Palisades. I can't recall exactly how many times we skied Palisades, but I believe it was 5 times in a row. We kept finding untracked swaths of snow, and we knew there was no where else on the mountain better than where we were.

Finally, close to 3pm, we decided to call it a day. We were driving back to Seattle that night, and wanted to get back to Basile's place at Alpine Meadows to gather our gear and get on the road before 6pm. It was hard to imagine that in little more than 12 hours, we would be sitting in traffic on I-5, wondering if this was going to be “the day” of the season.