We took a couple days off from skiing. Spring conditions—a warm day with nice soft snow on the groomers, but the runouts are already browning out on Backside.

We went down to Kirkwood for a fun day of skiing on the real deal. Kirkwood’s base is about 7900’, so they were getting snow when we were getting rain. It makes a difference.

More goofing around with Chingus at Northstar. Nancy is about five runs short of a million vertical feet for the season.

Mark flew up for a few days of skiing. The snow softened up a little in the afternoon for some springish conditions.

Nancy and I were both a little beat from skiing Squaw yesterday + our work schedule.

We came out early to Squaw on a busy holiday to see how the snow was holding up. I was amazed at how many race kids were out buzzing around with their coaches; you can see how Squaw turns out Olympic champions.

Conditions were generally pretty firm, as the rain from last Thursday froze and turned into a persistent ice layer.

We found some decent snow here and there, like here in Siberia Bowl, but most of the runs consisted of a lot of scratchy turns.

KT-22 is finally open, although everything from the Fingers to Dead Tree—a vast area—is all slide rubble. You’re limited to skiing GS Bowl, Oly and here on East Face.

We had a good time poking around looking for soft snow. Nancy went home to sleep and I had a tired night at work.

We got a trace of new snow (three inches, officially) on top of ice. Sketchy skiing anywhere off the groomers with lots of ice ruts to snag you.

It’s a holiday weekend, so we did laps on the Promised Land lift to avoid the lift lines.

Our lawn is now completely bare of snow, thanks to the recent rain and warm temps.

Our trail is now totally bare of ice and snow. This has turned into a ridiculously bad winter, much worse compared to our lousy winter from last year.

Example #1 of why you don’t want to get caught in an avalanche:

The ridges got three to five feet of heavy wet snow from our recent storms, with rain on top of that to make it even more heavy. As a result, the avalanche danger was extreme, and large areas of Squaw slid.

The entire lower part of East Face and connecting ridge slid, and here’s part of the flow coming out of East Face Gully.

You can see why all the avalanche deaths in the area in the last few years have been from blunt force trauma and not suffocation.

Example #2 of why you don’t want to get caught in an avalanche:

More avalanche rubble below Men’s Downhill in Siberia Bowl.

Example #3 of why you don’t want to get caught in an avalanche:

A large slide path on Siberia from an avalanche in North Bowl. The slide ran all the way across the run and up and over a knob to the left.

This was our first day of real skiing on real snow this season at Squaw. Nice skiing up top, but the amount of slide rubble was amazing.

We did find nice spring conditions with big soft bumps on Tower 16. It had some slide rubble as well, visible in the upper left.

It was very windy on the ridges, with nice wind buff at the top of Granite Chief.

Overall a very nice day, although it’s sad to see so much of Squaw rendered unskiable due to avalanches.

More dust on crust, but a few nice turns where it blew in. The wet snow from the past few days froze solid, so the groomers are very firm and the off-piste is extremely rutted with a little bit of new snow on top.

We had some fog in the neighborhood when I took Ryder out for his morning poop.

Nancy went out skiing in the morning and took this picture.

All the beautiful snow at the top of Lookout equals zero—ZERO!—new runs opening, because it’s still brown at the bottom of the lift. The only run open is Washoe, because any other line you take ends in dirt.

… and two inches at mid-mountain. In other words, a lot of heavy, heavy snow, even by Sierra cement standards.

It rained and snowed throughout the day, with the snow level fluctuating from 7000’ to 8500’.

The Burnout run was littered top to bottom with bewildered skiers and boarders unable to deal with the piles of cement.

It was not exactly a powder day. You had to straight-line everything, and good luck with the runouts. I met a retail employee who snowboards who took the wrong run in the morning and spent two hours crawling through a couple hundred yards of waist-deep muck.

The storm was a huge relief since we haven’t had anything up to this point. However, the high snow levels and torrents of rain were no help for all the runs that drop down to base level.

The drought isn’t over, but Folsom reservoir rose ten feet after three days of rain.

A big, wet storm is due to come in this weekend. We got a couple of inches overnight to play around in.

We have a big storm forecast for this weekend. It looks like the snow levels are going to be pretty high, but I’m putting the studs back on Nancy’s truck just in case.

Another day of man-made snow, another photo of Nancy kicking up some snow at the edge of a groomer.

We did get some snow showers, one or two inches.

And just how many jackets does she have?