Many skiers were psyched yesterday morning to see that 13” had fallen in the mountains in the last 24hrs….with more predicted throughout the day and tonight. Roads kept the traffic to a crawl, and Dustin, Reed and I weren’t on our way till after 8:30 am. We had plans to ski in the park, but the Avy Center issued an avy warning so we opted for some Teton Pass powder.
As we approached to top we saw a few groups hiking back to the lot and we hoped to get a parking spot. The lot turned out to be about 2/3 full. Now that the Village is open, I expect much of the weekday pressure taken off the parking situation up here. Jason Petervary greeted us as we pulled in and joined our little group for his second lap up Glory. Jay is a sick cyclist…and is doing a 350 mile snow-bike race in Alaska this February. Whoa!
My quads burned keeping pace with Jay, but it felt good to be out with friends. The Pass is a great place for everyone…and solo skiers can readily find partners as people ski to and from different areas all day. We ran into some familiar faces and ended up skiing three laps. Two runs on Second Turn and one on Twin Slides…for total of 5700′ of vert. Not quite Greg Hill pace (who is going for another million feet of BC skiing again this season), but my legs felt it non-the-less. The snow was thick…but skied great. Twin Slides was the best since it only looked like one or two people had skied it. We skied it conservatively… respecting the snowpack. We finished skiing at about 3:30 and it was snow wicked hard.
On our first run, another party’s dog, Atigun, got confused and followed us as we skied back down to the road. The pup luckily had a tag and we left some phone messages, before we stashed him in the truck as we left form some more powder turns. The owner, one of the 22Designs guys, called just as we started up for our third lap and was on his way. Glad it all worked out. No dog rants for now.
