Squaw Valley was absolutely unreal today. The storm everyone’s been talking about hit yesterday in full force and started out quite warm. It was raining everywhere, but slowly throughout the day the rain turned to snow and at about 7pm, it started to accumulate.

I went to bed dreaming of face shots and when I woke, my dreams were more true than ever. when dawn broke, 10-12 inches of snow was piled on my railing. I hastily made breakfast, threw on my gear and ran out the door towards the lifts.

At first, it was looking a bit grimmer than it initially seemed. the clouds broke for a minute and revealed a rugged looking snow surface littered with rocks and bushes poking up from the snow.

The fingers looks terrible to say the least, though with another 4 feet of snow they’d probably look pretty good. We all knew it snowed a lot, but the looks seemed to be deceiving. When Squaw finally opened, our hesitant feelings were promptly proven wrong.

There was quite a bit of snow, and coverage was pretty good. Visibility however was not. This kept thing grounded. Today wasn’t much of a day for sending as it was for skiing deep hippy pow turns.