Nancy came out to meet me after another graveyard shift and we had a fun day skiing in very windy, stormy conditions. It snowed hard overnight and into the day and another storm is coming tonight.

The snow was cold and dry again, so you sink through the new snow to the extremely thing snowpack underneath. If you go in the trees you hit a lot of debris, not that it kept me from trying.

I hit more rocks and logs than I can ever remember hitting in one day. I broke an edge and got some core shots, but my skis are old and beat up anyway.

I got out early after working a grave and actually got some face shots on Stampede. There was nobody out—on three of my first four runs I was the only one on the run. I got about ten runs in before going home to sleep.

The skiing is very sketchy off the groomers with nothing but ice and solid objects under the new dry snow. It’s nice to get snow, but we need a wet storm to cover the rocks and logs and persistent ice layer.

The last two days have been wretched skiing, with cold winds keeping anything from softening up. However, it started snowing this morning and should snow all day, so tomorrow should be good.

I have a new work schedule of four ten-hour days, two swing shift and two grave shifts. Today I’ll hang around the house, then take a nap before working 8:30 p.m. to 7:00 a.m.

Our trail is melted out all the way down to the creek. I continued past the creek and tried riding my new trail, but the north-facing aspect is still holding snow.

We fired up the fire pit for dessert after dinner. No skiing today … our trail is melting out so I rode down to the creek with Ryder.

We went out to Squaw for an afternoon of skiing and found it to be either very good or (mostly) very bad. It got warm the day before and then froze, so most of the mountain was iced over. Granite Chief in particular was especially heinous.

However, we did find some nice spring snow on the left edge of East Face.

It was quite warm out (I didn’t wear long johns or a shell) but there was no cloud cover to diffuse the heat, so only runs in direct sunlight softened up.

We also found nice snow on Squaw Creek—here’s Nancy using the baby trees as gates on Montezuma’s.

We went into Tahoe City to get some sandwiches and had lunch on the public pier. Afterwards we headed back to Squaw to watch a backcountry slideshow by a local badass.

Nancy was able to get out for a half-day, so we got some runs on an overcast day.

Northstar had decent-sized crowds for the three-day weekend, but nothing like last year. The skiing at Northstar right now is not much different than a normal snow year. You can’t ski in the trees, but nobody does anyway except on powder days, and the groomers are all covered. It seems like a third of the usual skiing population has given up on this winter.

All the new snow has burned away and now the trail by our house is either bare dirt or a sheet of ice. You need traction devices for the icy parts.

We went out to Alpine Meadows for the first time this year. It was a coldish day with an east wind that diminished throughout the day.

I hadn’t skied at Alpine since I worked here eight years ago. Alpine has some similarities to Squaw, like an abundance of gnarly steeps, but I’ve never been that excited about skiing here. The runs are all broken up into short pitches with runouts to other short pitches, and you have to do a lot of traversing.

Nancy hadn’t skied here in about twenty years, but our Squaw pass is good here since the two areas merged, so we thought what the hey?

The best turns were in Wolverine Bowl, which has good coverage and dry snow. Once you get out of the main bowl you start running into obstacles—rocks, trees, logs, etc.

We traversed out to Lakeview from the Scott chair looking for tracks and found a few turns amongst all the manzanita poking out of the snow. The Lakeview chair isn’t running due to the thin snowpack (neither is Sherwood).

It’s nice to get out on a real mountain with howling winds and steeps that get your attention and big-time skiers dropping sick lines. Northstar doesn’t have anything besides runs cut through trees, which gets pretty boring when there’s no snow.

We got up early for a powder day, but Northstar only had a couple of inches more than we had at the house, about 4-6” total. Still, it was nice to get some fresh turns.

You still can’t ski in the trees because it’s too thin to get more than a couple of turns here and there. You have to poke around to find fresh snow on the margins, like hovering through the weeds on the lower part of Lookout.

It was another cold, northerly storm. Storms from the north produce dry snow, but not much of it.

We goofed around until about 1:30 and wound up with 18 runs and about 26,000’ vert.

Nancy took off early from work to go skiing in the afternoon on a chilly Valentine’s Day.

There’s still a few patches of snow that you can manipulate for photo ops, but it’s still basically a little bit of dry snow on top of a lot of ice.

We got a couple of inches of dry snow from a northerly storm, and about four inches on the mountain.

I got out for some tele turns before work to stretch my hamstrings. The snow was so dry it did little to cover the ice, but it will give the groomers some snow to push around.

Through her job at TTSA, Nancy was invited to a CWEA awards dinner at the Ritz-Carlton at Northstar.

She brought me along to compare entrees and I wound up winning a Leatherman tool in a raffle.

Nancy just started working day shift, and on Fridays she can come in at 4:00 a.m., get off at noon and go skiing.

I joined her for some more icy groomers; a strong wind kept the snow from softening.

We went out to Squaw, not expecting much, but it was actually a lot of fun. We did a bunch of laps on Granite Chief, which has great snow, but as you can see, not a lot of it.

Normally, all of those little trees and big boulders are covered.

The snow was dry and wintry in the shade, and nicely softened where the sun was on it.

Nancy skis a mini-spine on upper Avalanche Gulch on Granite.

You just have to always be looking ahead, because there’s stuff poking out of the ground everywhere.

Today was the first day that felt a little like spring. The sun is getting higher, and the snow is actually softening in places. Skiing on the Promised Land run.

Nancy celebrated her last day of graveyard by skiing on a gray, drizzly day and then getting her hair cut.

I was going to ski a little bit longer until I had to go to work, but the drizzle would freeze as soon as it hit your goggles and you couldn’t see a thing.

Another cold night at mid-mountain, another 17-hour day. Go home, get a few hours sleep, then come back for swing shift. Sleepy, sleepy, sleepy. Anything for overtime.

That’s man-made snow on the tents—I got to listen to the snow guns all night.

Every year Burton puts up a big inflatable tent at mid-mountain for a weekend of promotions. I get overtime for sitting up there all night, keeping an eye on all the demo boards and making sure the air pump stays on.

I work my normal swing shift, then sit in the tent from midnight until 7:30 a.m.. It’s an easy gig, except for it being 10° at night. I’m wearing about five layers, along with using three heating pads and a small space heater to stay warm.

More firm groomers, but I'm liking my old Rossi Race Carvers. Skinny skis with some sidecut are a lot more fun than fat skis on the hardpack.

I got some turns in before work and Nancy stayed until last chair, getting as much skiing in as she can before she goes to day shift.

I bought some Rossignol Race Carver 198cm skis at a ski swap about ten years ago and have never used them. Non-shaped skis went out of fashion about five minutes after I got them and I’ve been on mid-fat skis ever since.

I’ve thought about getting rid of them, and I think I tried to sell them in a swap a couple of times, but I need something better suited for the icy conditions, so what the hell?

We got what I will generously describe as an inch of snow from the latest “storm.”

Woo-hoo! Powder day!