First Tracks, and some serious snow.

 First Tracks is the facility offered by the Ski Co for guests to go up on the lifts at 8am before they officially open and having a couple of runs with selected ski pros on untracked snow. It’s part of Mary’s job to organize this and put guests names on the list as each Friday comes around. This means that she (and I ! ) can join the selected group since Fridays are our days off. Thanks to Mary we got ourselves included in the season’s first First Tracks and celebrated with a bottle of Laphroaig at the top to commemorate a guest who had  died earlier in the year who was a regular First Tracks attender and apparently an avid Laphroaig connoisseur. Two great runs down from the top of the Elk Camp chair, suitably refreshed and on untracked snow.

The snow has now arrived big time. 5 feet of new snow on the tops and 4 feet in the village in the last week of the year. Hallelujah.

Made for some interesting bus driving though. Here on the No 1 Woodbridge run at the sometimes tricky Seasons Four turnaround. This though before the snow storms. Sheet ice instead.

Sadly though now confined to barracks for 5 days having both tested Covid positive despite 2 vaccinations and a booster and probably having had Covid before. Very mild symptoms through, so for us at least, no big deal.  Surprise, surprise.  No worse than a bad cold.  We’ll still get out skinning but staying well clear of contact with anyone. A week of work on full pay quite acceptable! Lucky through to be Town and Ski Co employees respectively. So hard for small business owners and so many vulnerable people on both the health and economic sides. 

Pics at top. M and I on the roof at 270. Shoveling - at least starting to. A confinement opportunity and to protect the structure of our house it needs to be done.

Finally, our friendly visitor of the previous post came back to see if there was any more bird seed around. Clearly he hasn't yet learnt the hibernation trick yet.  This though before the storms, so finally he might now be away.

Happy New Year to all readers ! 

Early season skinning

 There have been some good early snow falls on the high Mountain Lyon opening day at Thanksgiving time but precious little on the lower slopes. Buttermilk open a couple of weeks later and we took advantage of a fine early December day, I think the opening day at buttermilk, the skin to the top, have a usual cuppa coffee and muffin and ski down. Just nice to know we can still do it!

And a slightly different sort of day skinning up towards Coffe Pot at Snowmass before the run had opened. It was deep heavy snow and we felt exposed. No ski patrol if things had gone awry! But why should they?

Bruin visit

 We had an uninvited guest at the beginning of December. The bear population is generally believed to have gone into hibernation by mid November, and we thought there was a local edict allowing birdfeeders to be put up after November 15. Well this guy who is one of a pair of cubs got left behind by his sibling and his mom when they successfully hibernated apparently a couple of weeks ago. The wildlife section of the local police department had been following them and this fellow in particular over the last few weeks. He found our birdfeeder just too tempting notwithstanding it was attached to a branch some 15 feet above ground level and level with the top of our deck. Rocky, one of our local cops came and shot a beanbag at him which he barely felt. After a couple of repeat efforts he slowly trotted away to find some other food source presumably. They say that if he is still around in a couple of weeks time, they will take him to a wildlife refuge 100 miles or so away and release him where there is no prospect of a residential food source. Sorry as we felt for this lovely young bruin, it was an exciting start to the day.