Mood:
lazyTopic: shred report
New Snow: 0"
Conditions: hard pack
After spending xmas day in the powder at Targhee, riding groomers at JHMR was anticlimactic. I was pretty tired, and it was cold at 9am, so I took my time getting to the slopes. I think it was 11am when I finally loaded onto the gondola for my first run. Temperatures had risen into the 20's, and the sun had burned away all the clouds, so it was a perfect, warm, bluebird day. When I got to the top, I took a look up headwall since it had just opened yesterday.
I overheard a few skiers who had just come down say it was nice, but they weren't sure it was worth the hike. Since I wasn't wearing my pack, and I wasn't too thrilled about riding the non-groomed mogul field (Laramie Bowl) between Thunder and Sublette, I decided not to bother. Ok, so maybe I was just feeling lazy. I admit it. My friend A was working for Elevation Imaging at the top of the gondi, so I stopped to say hello. There was a guy about to paraglide off the summit, and he wanted A to take pictures. Check it out at http://bit.ly/8Q2FTO if you're interested.
I decided to head over to Casper and stick to groomed trails. Upper Sundance had huge moguls, so I picked my way through them and stayed near the edge of the trail, carving through the skied off pile of snow that had accumulated there. I stopped to look back up the hill, and the sky was such a beautiful, bright blue that I had to take a picture of the gondola and the conditions.
I carved down Easy Does It, but I couldn't resist the untracked powder in the trees. It wasn't as deep as it appeared, but it wasn't bad at all. I carved deeper into the woods, only cutting back when I saw the traverse below me. I made it over to Casper Liftline, but it hadn't been groomed in a few days and the cover was getting thin. I crossed it and took the upper traverse to Moran, which had enough snow piled on the side of the trail to keep my edges. I stopped at the junction of South Pass Traverse and Lower Werner to look down over the halfpipe.
It looked like fun, and there was a little bit of a scene there. On another day, I would have hung out and hiked for a while, and probably met some cool people in the process. Did I mention that I was feeling lazy? I traversed over to Hanna, which is usually icy, but actually was the best run I took all day. Again, I was in the sluff on the side of the trail, but there was enough of it to keep me carving. The bottom of the trail is right at the convergence of the trail coming down from Teewinot and the loading area for Apres Vous. There was a gate to prevent speed demons from crashing into the liftline, which I slowly went around before cutting donw toward Bronco. Without the gate, I probably could have made it into Bronco, but I would have been a hazard to everyone around and I wasn't really in the mood to take the jumps anyway. Actually, the air isn't the problem - it's the landing. Since I'm still riding with a knee brace on my back leg, I don't think it's a good idea to put any unnecessary pressure on it. So I've only been hitting things that have really smooth landings that I know I can absorb easily. But it looked fun, and the kids in the park were going big.
Lower Teewinot was still fresh corduroy, so I took the opportunity to practice riding fakie and hopped back on the chair for another run. For those of my readers who aren't up on snowboarding lingo, fakie is when you ride backwards. In snowboarding, fakie and switch are often used interchangably, but in skateboarding there is a distinct difference. Fakie means you keep your feet in the same positin but you ride backwards, with the tail of your board leading the way. Switch means you turn your body around on the board, so your back leg is now closer to your nose, and your front leg is near the tail of the board, but the board is still travelling in the direction of the nose. I hope you're paying attention. There will be a quiz later. Right now, I'm going home to take a nap.
