December 2-3:Loveland and Berthoud

This is going to be a fast post as I have to make it to work in a little while. Got back to Denver on Sunday after a very relaxing vacation in Florida with the family (more pictures later) and was greeted by snow, lots of snow. Tons of snow up in the mountains in fact, around 63" in one snowfall at Loveland in fact. Hooky was definetly played on Monday, in fact, it couldn't really be stopped considering the 20" of fresh that they reported Monday AM. I know it's not good to play hooky from work but 20" of fresh!?! That's amazing! Last year I drove to different parts of the state to get that kind of powder, and now it's sitting at my local hill. Work didn't have a chance.
Anyways, an excellent day was spent meadow skipping on the lower angle stuff at Loveland (the avalanche danger was pretty high-so I think they were afraid to open the steeps and the steeps under Chair 1 were pretty bumped out from the last few days). They opened up Benton's Bowl and Dave's Ditch (which I think is the first secret pow stash that I've discovered at Loveland (much thanks to my friend Lindsay!). Benton's tracked out pretty quickly, but there were a couple of excellent runs in really deep powder. And I mean slogging heavy deep. The sanouks were able to plow through it with no problem, but when I swapped to the motherships they were having issues with the heavyness of it. The good news with the heavyness of the snow is that it's making the avy danger go down as the snowpack is solidifying much quicker. It was still an awesome day to get to ski that kinda snow, and finding Dave's was the cream on top of the cake!
Tom and I had planned a seasons first Dawn Patrol for Tuesday up at Berthoud, so the next 4:30 AM rolled around and we were out the door and on our way up the pass. We were greeted by gusty breezes and a stunning sunrise full of alpenglow and the reds and yellows lighting into the snow. Absolutly beautiful. A pretty short skin up (I was feeling the fact that I'd been at sea level for almost the last few weeks, whew!) and we dug a quick pit to see what the base layers were doing, and found rotten sugar snow! We had already had the plan of sticking to skiing the Meadows down to the very bottom of Roll Out as the Avy danger had been at High the day before, so seeing this layer of rotten snow we decided to stick exactly to that plan.
The ski down however was a beautiful soulful meadow skip, and felt more than a little solid. Tom did a quick ski cut over a more convex roll over, and it didn't even budge. I think this new density of snow is definetly solidifying. It was awesome to get up to Berthoud and see it so filled in. There were a couple of spots that needed some extra snow but I can't wait to get some major skiing time in up there this season! Hopefully, I'll have time for another tour on Sunday, so Mel can get some more practice time in, but between now and then I need to focus on work as much as it pains me. Keep prayin' for more snow for right now.
On the Stereo-Dispatch-Passerby