Clocking out at the end of another slow day.

Today was the last day of the season for Squaw Valley. Fortunately, we had great snow to close it out; a good freeze last night and sunny skies with a slight east wind.

Nancy’s friend from high school, Anna Chaput, and her friend Terry joined us for some turns.

Anna spent all day looking for the most extreme lines. Here she is hammering the bumps into puny little piles on East Face.

Anna? Are you sure you want to do East Face again? It’s looking a little bony.

Nancy skied for three hours before leaving to attend a retirement party for a co-worker in Reno.

Upper East Face Gully had some great snow. It was a classic spring day: ski the east-facing pitches in the morning, and hit the north-facing runs in the afternoon.

Terry doing some knee-dippin’ on Red Dog Ridge.

We skied ourselves silly, and then at 4:00 I joined the crowd for last chair of the season at the top of KT-22.

I like to ski the last run of the season on West Face in memory of Andy “Sheisty Boy” Pertzborn, our old ski buddy. The snow was great, the bumps were huge, and I was smiling the whole way down thinking about Andy.

A nice spring day at Squaw, skiing soft bumps.

We’re on the cat track from KT-22 to Olympic Lady, overlooking Alpine Meadows.

Bret telemark skiing the bumps in Chute 75.

Nancy met up with an old friend, Anna Chaput, at her last high school reunion. Anna mentioned that she’s a telemark skier and has a Squaw pass, so we finally met up with her and her buddy Terry for a day of skiing.

Anna is pretty impressive on the teles—she rips all the runs at Squaw.

Nancy had to charge hard to keep up.

The snow was outstanding, a big relief from the awful conditions the last time we were out.

We skied all over until 2:00, when Nancy and I had to run off to work. It was a really fun day.

Nancy has started riding to work, as long as I pick her up coming home.

Nancy went nutty with the rake yesterday and today, getting the front and back done.

We went out for a couple hours at Squaw, but it sucked. Sticky, manky snow, flat light, and dreary weather.

I got a call to come into work because someone called in sick—good excuse to leave.

The warm temps have melted all the snow in the neighborhood. I’m jogging up our trail from Martis Creek with Ryder—we both have some lbs. to lose.

Today was the last day of skiing at Northstar, so we came out for a few hours before work (Nancy is now on swing shift). The skiing was pretty good, with soft conditions that got a little sticky as the day progressed.

We got lucky at the tail end of the season with little storms coming along often enough to keep all the runs open, although the trees never did fill in enough to suppress the stuff underneath.

Nancy wound up with about 1.2 million vertical feet of skiing at Northstar for the season. I only got about 850K, so it’s pretty obvious who’s more core.

We had one of our best powder days of the year. We only got a couple of inches of snow at the house, but at Northstar the snow ranged from a foot to knee deep, and pretty dry.

Here’s Nancy in the Promised Land trees.

I got my best run of the year in the trees next to Stampede—knee deep, untracked powder, flying through the trees.

This is later after things got tracked out, getting a patch of low-angle powder in the willows.

We got a few inches of snow on an icy base. It was kinda fun, except for the icy base part. Every turn sounded like a phonograph needle being dragged across an LP.

We got out for some spring conditions. Maybe a little too spring—the bottom of Lookout is looking ugly.

There was an end of the season employee party in the Village, and it looks like one of the celebrants had some Italian food with his beer.

Security was there to help him out.

I came out before work for a couple of hours and found the skiing to be very, very good. Here’s some tracks on corn snow through the willows.

Nancy took a couple hours off from work and got out around 1:30. She said the skiing was awesome!, the best carving conditions of the year. She didn't want the day to end, even jumping on a chairlift after 4:00.

Today marked Nancy getting her 1,000,000th vertical foot of skiing at Northstar. Woo-hoo!

Getting some turns on a chilly afternoon.

We took a day off from skiing to laze around the house.

Another chilly day—I took Ryder for a walk and took a hand saw to clear some blowdown from our trail.

It got cold last night and froze the spring snow and then a few inches of dry snow fell after midnight, so we had a little bit of snow on top of ice.

Nancy came out to Northstar in the morning to meet me after my graveyard shift. We skied until noonish, at which point a couple of runs in the sun were just starting to soften up.

Hey! It's snowing!

We got out for a nice day of spring skiing at Squaw.

Nancy is skiing Headwall Face next to prayer flags placed in honor of Andrew Entin, a patroller who died in in an avalanche here on 3/3/09.

We had a hard freeze last night and warm temps today, so it was an afternoon of following the sun to find the soft snow.

Nancy gets some turns on lower Tom’s Tumble.

We finished the day with a couple of runs on Chute 75 and West Face.

Whenever Nancy drops into Chute 75 she flashes back to tumbling all the way down it one day as a kid. It’s such a bad memory that when I suggest skiing Chute 75, she always responds with, “Really? REALLY?”

We had a great powder day for April Fools. I had my best powder runs of the season, spitting out snow type of runs.

There were a lot of locals out, but I still got a number of untracked runs.

For some bizarre reason (ha-ha, April Fools!), Patrol decided to open White Rabbit, a windward slope that rarely opens due to lack of snow. It was a strange decision because a) it hadn’t been open all year, and b) Northstar Ski Patrol is extremely cautious to open anything with a thin snowpack.

I decided to ski it just to ski it and see how thin it was. I had to hack my way in, got about eight turns in knee-deep powder in a short section where the snow blows in, and then hacked my out through the manzanita.