New Snow Reported by Resort ? 0 cm
New Snow Observed on Mountain ? approx. 1-2 cm (1 inch)
Surface Conditions ? Some Powder /  Mostly Chowder
Sky ? light / moderate snow
Temp ? near freezing at the base (30-35 F), upper 20s F at summit
Skiers ? Jay, Dave, Erica, James
Runs / Vertical Skied - 5 / 10,550’

 After two days of fairly hard skiing, we took it a bit easier on Thursday.  Chris decided to hang in the motel room, Greg had to head back to Seattle, and the rest of us went out for a light day at Red Mountain.  It’s simple when all you have to do is walk a few hundred yards to the lift, and get to ski back to the room once you feel tired.  I’m convinced that staying slopeside and getting a good night’s sleep allowed us to go skiing each day, with minimal aches and pains.  Well, OK, having many ski days under our belts before the trip helped in that area.  Still, we may have sat out a day or two if we had to drive an hour or so each way to get to the slopes.  We started out with a warm-up run in the mellow trees of Paradise.  Paradise was rapidly becoming Dave’s favorite area, due to the mellow trees and the consistently light snow.
 The February 2000 issue of Skiing magazine has a list of 100 skiing things to do before you die.  In this list, the third category mentioned skiing some lesser known runs that were really awesome.  One of these runs was called "Cambodia" at Red Mountain.  We had decided even before the trip that we needed to hit Cambodia since it was on the list, and hell, we had six days at the resort to do it.  When you get off the top of the Motherlode lift (the big summit lift), you can head to the right and follow a traverse that heads you out onto a shoulder of the mountain.  This is the way we went to hit the steep 40 degree section I mentioned from day one know as Short Squaw.  Looking at the map, we saw that Cambodia was farther out on the traverse, but with no signs and the map just indicating a bunch of squiggles where the trails started, it wasn’t going to be straightforward.  We tried our best to situate ourselves above the clearing where we though the trail was, and then dove in.  The snow was as beautiful as the other day, mostly tracked up of course, but oh so soft.  The pitch was probably 30-35 degrees, and we were on a trail about 30-40 feet wide.  Before long, the trail just seemed to disappear and we were back in the trees again.  Now it was just steep trees about 5-10 feet apart; we had no idea where the trail had gone.  Then we came into a section of trees where it seemed that all the low branches had been removed.  They were fairly tight, about 4-6 feet apart, and about 6-8 inches in diameter.  Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking all the trees are big huge conifers out at Red.  They follow the laws of light / water availability just like everywhere else.  If the trees are tight, they grow more slowly and end up thinner.  If they are by themselves they tend to be larger.  This is at least what my observations revealed during my trip.  We headed generally down and to the left, and it remained at the same steep angle.  Finally we broke out of the woods onto a trail, and ran into a friend from the Burlington Vermont area named Chad.  He commended us on skiing the tight trees just like Vermonters (although it seems that the skiers here ski any trees no matter how tight they are).  We mentioned that we were trying to ski Cambodia, and Chad and his friends said that we were pretty much around there in the trees.  So we’d found the general area, even if it wasn’t all that well defined.  We chalked Cambodia up as skied, and figured we’d be back anyway within the next few days.
 We had another piece of exploration on this day.  We knew that Granite Mountain was touted as 360 degree skiing, so "theoretically" we couldn’t get lost on the mountain right?  Well, we weren’t quite so sure about that, so we had been playing it safe… until today that is.  When one gets off either the Motherlode lift or the Paradise lift (the two lifts that service the top areas of the mountain) and heads left, a green traverse takes you around the mountain.  This traverse trail, known as Ridge Road, eventually stops traversing and heads down the mountain towards the base of the Paradise lift.  It actually remains at a gentle grade the whole way, so that even a novice could follow the route.  The left side of this traverse offers a continuous drop into pleasantly pitched blue / black trails and woods.  The right side however, was a mystery to us.  At the very top, the right side featured the peak of the mountain with some microwave towers.  This peak gradually dropped away as the traverse continued, until it was possible to head into the woods through a series of singletrack cuts.  We weren’t really sure where these went, and although we saw a lot of tracks, we’d never seen people going that way.  On this occasion however, we did see a couple fellows slide off in that direction and decided, what the heck, we’ll follow.  In general, the ski area boundary was sufficiently marked, and we saw no such markings here.  We jumped in with the single tracks, and after about 50 feet or so, the pitch dropped right out on us and we were atop small (10-20 foot) cliffs with steep chutes allowing access to the region below.  The chutes were fairly tight, but we all jumped in and found nice routes.  This steep section was short lived, and the terrain soon dropped out into low pitch woods, then finally brought us to the Short Squaw trail and back to the base of Motherlode.
 We finished off the day with a run right down below the Motherlode lift line.  For some reason, it didn’t seem to get very tracked up, and we rarely saw skiers there.  The top was roped, but not hard.  It had just enough rope to let you know it was steep, but room was left to skirt around.  It started out with a nice steep pitch for about 50 feet.  I dropped in with a couple of quick jump turns, and near the bottom, I encountered one rock that I warned the others to avoid.  When I yelled up that there was a rock down below, a guy from the lift shouted
"The whole thing’s a rock!"
As it turns out, the area was a bit of a cliff, but it was fairly well covered so to us it came across as a short steep face.  There was plenty of snow for everyone to get down without heavy rock encounters.  The snow was excellent, and off to the skier’s right, we were below the steep treed slopes that formed one side of the broad gully of the Motherlode lift.  By traversing across, we could catch small sections of these steeps, but we still didn’t know how to approach those steeps from above, that would require more exploration.  The snow held out for quite a while, but by the time we got below 5000 feet, it started to get a bit mushy.  Even with the midfats, it was a piece of work.  We decided to hit the groomers and run it out back to the motel.  It continued to snow lightly as we hung out at the motel, waiting for our friend Scott to arrive from Seattle.  He would be joining us for the next two days at Red Mountain.

On to the pictures!