Day 14: Alpine Meadows

We woke up early to a full 60″ of fresh powder at Alpine Meadows. After the requisite coffee (and not as requisite food), we headed over to the mountain. Apparently the road had been closed until right before we got there due to avalanche danger, but Chico, Andy, Scott, Jimmy and I made it up on the mountain by 9:30. It could have been a lot faster, but we had to deal with some super slow ticket sales… We started on Summit, did a hike to the Saddle – I ultimately went a bit further than everyone else and ended up doing Keyhole. The view from the top was pretty awesome, and after navigating a bit of bomb debris, I got to have first tracks down the mountain, although there were probably only 3 on the face. I caught up to everyone else doing the Roundhouse-Yellow-Scott-Promised Land loop, and we just kept doing laps all day (with the exception of a trip to Sherwood and Expert Shortcut. One by one people dropped out until it was just Scott and and I, and I swear the conditions just got better and better all day, though the wind picked up significantly by 1:00 and it was dropping quite a bit of snow.

Jimmy had to leave early, so I piled in the car with everyone else. It was pretty shocking to get back to the car to find about a foot of snow sitting on it, considering the conditions had been super nice when we got there in the morning. Overall we put in about 6 hours, and according to Chico’s heart rate monitor, about 2500 calories.

Here is some fancy iMovie work of Chico riding down through Promised Land.