If you wish to first read the text associated with this day click here.

After getting to the summit via the Granite Chairlift, we headed down to skier's right, towards the Paradise area.  Our friend Scott had recently arrived for his first ski day.  MY intentions were to give Scott a chance to warm up on something groomed in the Paradise area, but before we knew what happened, the group was snaking through the trees grabbing some fresh snow that they had spied from above.  Thankfully, Scott was ready to go, as he demonstrates here amongst the trees.  Where exactly were we?  Well, I'm not entirely sure, but as you can see from the bright area on the Paradise map, we were in the region of trails known as Southern Belle (#45), and Inagadadavida (#50).  Honestly though, it just felt like endless, endless trees.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

By the next run, Scott was ready to blast through some trees, as we see here in an area just above the mid-mountain Paradise Lodge.  The conditions continued to be light snow and fog as you can tell from the pictures, so unfortunately it wasn't weather for the best images. Somewhere in this area, a tree well decided to give Scott's pole a serious bend.  Fortunately it wasn't a mortal wound, and his pole was straightened out at the Paradise lodge.  Through some "careful bending", his pole was eventually "almost" straight.  Note:  the image with the pole is before we fixed it ;).
 
 

Now that Scott was REALLY warmed up, we decided to take him down some of the steep terrain that we had recently discovered on what we termed the "back side" of the mountain.  After some very steep areas and cliffs, the terrain eventually mellowed out into an area of relatively tight trees with a mazework of paths to get though them.  We didn't know it at the time, but as I look at the map, it appears as though we were in the area of trail #56, which is known as "Beer Belly".  I'm not sure if the upper steep section even has a name, since we never saw any signs.  In the image to the left, a mystery skier goes for broke shooting a tree gap in the Beer Belly area.  I see a pair of skis, and a hand.  My sources tell me that J.Spin is back there somewhere.
 
 

Continuing on down, we eventually found ourselves along the ski boundary area (see map).  The terrain gradually mellowed to blue, and then eventually green as we merged into trail #20 (Long Squaw).  We found nice areas of trees with blue pitch to the skier's left along the boundary.  To the left, the group pauses for a group photo below the largest tree that we found on our trip.  It was huge; right out on the left side of the trail.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

By the end of the day, the wind had started to pick up, and the snow increased in intensity.  Little did we know, but we were in for the biggest dump of our trip.  Get ready for some even deeper powder as we head over to Ski Day 5 of our trip.