2/22/12 Gluttony and the Reset Button 2/23/12

Out in to the 11 inch day at Vail yesterday on my day off.  Skied  inbounds for a couple nice runs and then headed out to see the conditions in EV.  We seem to have avoided the big winds predicted for Wednesday and the new snow was accompanied by warm temps and layered in the resort like spackle.  After waiting for openings, the sounds of bombs filling the air, we headed up the Poma.  Took notice of the ski patrol bomb holes on the way out.  No significant movement from any of the charges on the steep east face above the catwalk, just some isolated cracking around the blast holes. Looking around at the other black marks in China and Blus Sky and again, no activity.

The last three days I’ve been poking, prodding and stomping around, looking for evidence of instability with the recent winds and then the 11 inches that turned into a foot and a half in EV. We started our day in Tweeners, taking the opportunity to break small burgeoning cornice chunks along the way. As with the previous days, nothing.  Some minor shedding of the upper wind affected scarp areas, but theses natural slab breaks were tiny and only ran a few feet.

The skiing in Tweeners was again accompanied by no movement whatsoever.  No sluffing and no slab release in the upper concave wind affected face.  The lower triangle face held again and we were off into the trees to enjoy some deep freshness. So far so good.

Second run we decided to get back to the Old Man.  Old Man’s had sat unskied for a few days.  With the ridge top winds,  this was going to put our observations to the test.  We spent a good fifteen minutes taking turns trundling stove sized cornice chunks down into the scarp area.  We made a mess of things in the upper entrance, but completely necessary to see if anything would step down into the rollover faces that ran last week.  Again watched the chunks impact and explode, with no results.

Stepped into the right side, J leading the charge and sent it. Watch as his tracks laced the right side again with no movement, sluffing cracking or slab release of any kind. Luke and I followed one at a time,  meeting up at a safe area in the right tree stand.  We all kind of looked at eachother. Holy shit, a day of deep snow and moderate stability.  I couldn’t believe it either. Looking up, we could see that the second rollover face was still not filled in completely from last week and shark fins protruded from the thin snow. No visible naturals anywhere we could see. Spacklefest was on.

The factors?.  I don’t claim to know why this was possible, but the dense wet  snow, warm temps and little wind helped. The weak layers are still down there in the pack but at least today they were dormant.

Third run Luke and I had EV to ourselves and took out time to enjoy a lenghty skin.  We took a slow boat out to our favorite actual East Vail Chute and took time digging a pit and doing some CT tests.  We should have a video of the CT results and a brief gratuitous pow video to view soon. Again, the snow was deep and unreactive.  Skiing pow without having to dodge bullets every turn was a nice change, if only for a day.  We got out of EV finally around 5 pm.  We were powder gluttons for sure, and our cup runneth over today.  A whole large pizza then sleep.

Woke up, muscles tired and groggy. Looked out the window to see that reset button has been pushed again.  Another four inches and dumping at 7 am, with the winds up and no visibility.  Not assuming anything about snow today as weather conditions are drastically different.  Start at square one with the progression of runs and snow assessment again. Headed out to see what is going on in the ever-changing world of EV  Looks like second season is on and the storms are starting to track our way. Let you know.