It poured rain all evening and all last night with a snow level of about 9500’ and didn’t turn to snow until about 4:00 a.m. So instead of getting four feet of snow, we only got about four inches.

We got so much rain that a lake formed at mid-mountain next to the Vista chair. They had to close the lift and the run, dig a ditch through it, and lay down a pipe at the end of the ditch to drain the lake.

Nancy came out first thing after work and promptly got sandbagged. They opened the link to Lookout by mistake, and Nancy wound up at the bottom of the Martis Peak chair with about forty other skiers. The problem was, the chair was frozen from all the rain and wasn’t running anytime soon.

She stood at the bottom for an hour and a half until a shuttle bus arrived to take them back to the village. After that, she was so cold and disgusted that she almost came home, but I came out before work to ski with her.

I met Nancy in the lodge where she was trying to warm up and we headed out to find something good to ski.

Here’s some low-angle freshies on the Castle Peak run, still sticking to the man-made snow on the groomers. As you can see, there’s still very little natural snow in the trees. There’s also still lots of ice on the groomers.

The day started warm and wettish, but the temps dropped throughout the day and it kept snowing off and on, so the skiing progressively got better.

There were actual bumps on the Iron Horse run. This was my first run of the year skiing snow that wasn’t flat.

We finished off the day by semi-poaching a couple of runs off of Vista (the runs are closed due to the thin coverage), putting down the only tracks on the runs. There was just enough snow to—for the most part—keep from hitting the ground underneath.

January 21, and this was our first run of the year on all natural snow. Crazy.