Today was a classic powder day at Squaw Valley USA. 16″ of fresh snow graced Squaw’s desirable slopes. The line up for the Funitel was large. The rush into the Funitel building was chaotic. The cramming into the actual Funitel was sardine-like.
Once freed from the heinous Funitel ride, things re-normalized. The ride up Siberia revealed a Palisades that was prime and ready for ski bases. The Reverse Traverse opened at 9am along with the Palisades, which was weird and something I’d never seen before. There were certainly a few close calls as skiers came mobbing out of the Palisades and had to thread the needle between traversing Reverse Traversers.
Patrol was letting people ski Headwall down the Mountain Run to the base, which was very cool considering Mountain Run has been closed for a couple weeks.
The Chimney was closed and the Palisades closed after two runs. The Tube was great. Aaron Fox, who hasn’t skied the Chimney this season, hit the biggest air of the day just skier’s left of The Tube. Extra Chute was mellow and happy and frequented. We did one Reverse Traverse and skied Hogsback to Siberia. Hogsback was fun.
By the time we’d gotten to Granite it was pretty beaten up and had a long line. Corkscrew still held great fall-line skiing. We did a few laps there before the line became overly abrasive.
We cruised back to Siberia and the line wasn’t small because the Gold Coast chair was broken. We did three more laps on Siberia before doing a Reverse Traverse to Cornice II to Mountain Run. This was my favorite run of the day. Deep, completely fresh snow and nowhere to go but down.
Once down, we stayed down. It was 1pm and we were more than satisfied and tired of waiting in line.
Tomorrow will be another great day.
PHOTO TOUR:
A bro dropping into Extra Chute. Palisades. Squaw
awesome TR – great stoke!!
lame that you guys can’t be stoked on a powder day in April. Lame that you couldn’t figure out how to get the goods even with reverse Traverse being closed. Lame that you have to complain about everything Squaw does, or doesn’t do anymore…
Could it be anymore lame than you posting the same regurgitated pro KSL propaganda over and over?
just shocking, they shouldda shut down rather than traumatise the poor sad sacks.
Great pr yesterday staying open to 4 pm. Today, very sour feeling for a lot of people at Alpine and Squaw.
Lame that reverse traverse was closed because people were skiing the mountain run. I think it is time to change the tag line this mountain has soul to this mountain had soul. Alpine was silly to not have roundhouse. Line for summit was ridiculous.
Amount of snow it would have taken to make Mt. Run manageable = not that much, in fact it was just fine as is. Management surprised by the fact that people want to ski powder. A fun morning soured by a really really poor decision to close Reverse Traverse. Squandered opportunity to close out on a high note. My appologies to patrol for being the bearers of bad news all afternoon.