Day 31 - Kissing the toads

So we had some fresh snow over the last 24hrs, I woke up to the distant booms of Avalanche control explosions echoeing around th valley. That's normally a sign of a good day ahead. The plan was a 9.30 meet with Jon and Sarah at the lift station, and Zoe to join us on the mountain as she arrives from a diffent end of the lift system. When we got to the top of the first run we were pleased to find more snow than expected, but the wind had been busy which conspired to make the Avalanche risk 3 on a scale of 5. That sounds ok doesn't it, until you read what they mean. Level 3 means considerable risk of Avalanche.

Bearing all this in mind our first run was very mellow through some meadows with a few trees in about 20cm of nice light snow. Then Zoe appeared as we reached the next lift so we headed up to the highest lifts to search out the best snow. We were among the first skiers to get to the top and the whole mountain was untracked. We skied over quite a lot of 'challenging' terrain to get to what looked like the best snow, but the wind had disguised it. It all looked good but the depth was varying drastically and the layer below was solid frozen ice from the rain earlier in the week. I was happy to ski over the crap to get to the better snow below us, I'm not so sure the others enjoyed that method so much. But sometimes you have to kiss a few toads.