Northstar ran the Vista lift for two hours to thank the employees for the winter season. Cold day with a little bit of everything: gray, sunny, snow flurries, windy, more sun, more snow and sun at the same time, and so on. I got a quick eleven runs in on mostly dust on crust.

Afterwards was a free lunch at the Day Lodge. It was a nice touch by Northstar, not the sort of thing most resorts would do.

The few remaining ski areas still open are closing next weekend, so these are most likely my last runs of the year.

Today was the last day for skiing at Northstar. We met Mark for one last outing, with good snow (where there was snow) due to a cool north wind.

The traverse back to the Backside lift was barely hanging in there.

All the runs on the other side of Backside were closed off because the Backdoor traverse had melted out and there was no more snow to push onto it.

They ran out of snow to push onto the Village Run a couple of days ago, so we had to download on the Gondola to get back to the village.

Nancy wound up with 1.4 million vertical feet of skiing at Northstar, Heavenly and Kirkwood. Chingus was only a million feet behind.

Not only was it the last day for Northstar, it was the last day for my beloved AK Launchers. When we got down I discovered the ski on the left was missing about 6” of edge.

I took a few hours off from work to ski to the end with Mark and Nancy. I ended the season with 1.1 million feet, so you can tell who’s more core between Nancy and I.

We got out with Chingus for one last day at Squaw.

There was a solid freeze last night, which resulted in excellent spring conditions once the sun hit the slopes.

Chingus is working through the rocks on Rockpile, with Granite Chief in the background.

Squaw didn’t have much open, just KT-22 on the lower mountain and Granite Chief up top. Their decision to keep Headwall and Siberia closed and run a useless lift like Big Blue instead had the locals shaking their heads.

The runs that were open were very good; here’s Nancy exiting the bottom of Chute 75.

The snow off of Oly was excellent. Here’s Mark dropping into Women’s Downhill.

We didn’t get out to Squaw as often as we would have liked this year, mostly because the winter ended before it ever really started. However, most of the days we came out were really fun.

Despite the good skiing on the upper mountain, Squaw is planning to close in a week. Adios.

Mark “Chingus” Standen came up from sunny Orange County for the final weekend of skiing. We lucked into good weather and good snow conditions, where there is snow.

Northstar has been busy farming the lower, closed runs for snow to push onto the open runs to keep them going. The Backside is barely hanging on—even with the farming, the Backdoor traverse is about to go.