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.