Day Tripping

Since Kyla won't be back for Spring break, and she doesn't have time for frivolous activities like snowboarding while at school(!), we've been trying to find the right day to go to the snow while she's here. Yesterday she and I left the house at 4:45AM to go to Kirkwood. It has been so warm here that we were afraid if we didn't go now, it would only get worse. We've had maybe 4 inches of rain in the last week or two, which normally would be 4-5 feet of snow where we go, but the snow levels have been at least 8,000 feet. The base of Kirkwood is 8,000 feet. Snowboarding in the pouring rain is just a bad idea, and that's what we would have gotten the day before. Turns out it was beautiful. It was right around freezing when we got there, which made all the runs pretty much a sheet of ice. Still, as the sun got higher, it softened up like it does in the spring. It wasn't crowded, and while we kept an eye out for snowboarding Santa, we didn't see him.

Here's what "the backside" looks like on the way up. They opened it around 10:30. See the kind of rivulet formations running down the mountainside? This was a byproduct of the rain the day before, and if it's frozen, you want to stay the hell off of it. However, by the time things opened, it was soft on top, so off we headed to the ungroomed parts before too many people chopped them up.

And here is Kyla after a calf-burning traverse over to the wide open ungroomed spaces. If you look at the picture above, I took this picture on the slope at the upper left corner.