Hoodoo
It snowed another 14" last night. Since powder days are so far and few between this year, I had to take another shot. I got up a little after 6 and was on the road by 6:30. I learned from my previous excursion to plan on a two hour drive. The upside is the days are getting longer so the trip was mostly in daylight.
I arrived about 8:40am--plenty of time to get a pass and get ready. Despite that, there were still more than 100 people in line in front of me.
The restless natives await the ceremonial rope drop.
Conditions look good on the ride up.
Hoodoo's got the views. Looking south towards Mt. Washington and the Three Sisters (to the right).
A little closer. That's Big Lake in the foreground.
It was clear enough to see Three Fingered Jack (on the right) and the taller Mt. Jefferson (just to the left).
A bit closer.
Snow conditions were really good for the first few hours. Hoodoo isn't very big so it was mostly skied out by 11 and by noon anything that wasn't skied off was getting really heavy.
I'm finishing up this blog post on April 8. I had mostly given up hope after that day; I've abandoned it at this point. Hoodoo isn't enough to get me excited about spring skiing. Moreover, if I'm going to do that it's a lot more fun with a crew. That said, it snowed 10" at Hoodoo last night. I didn't even bother since I've got work to do today. To rationalize not going today, I'm going to just assume that the surface underneath that 10" is really crummy and it's not very good.
As I said at the end of last year, I'm not sure how many more years I'll be able to shred the pow. It's disappointing to watch season after season go by with marginal conditions. I shouldn't be surprised--as I've discussed here in the past, the climate models have been astonishingly accurate in predicting patterns here. We're seeing more variability and the snow level is going up.
In the meantime, I'll hold onto hope for next season.
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