The word of the day was ice.  My other choice was crapulence.

Saturday night brought a pretty nasty windstorm through North Bend so Konnie and
I were kept up most of the night due to various UFOs hitting the windows and
such.  It has been pretty warm of late so I knew that the conditions at the
Scummit wouldn't be ideal, but hey, getting some turns is a lot better than no
turns.

Greg Prior was going to join me, however, he turned out to be the smarter of the
two of us and slept in.  We decided that I would call him from the hill.  I
arrived at Alpental at 8:45 to blue skis, 31 degrees and wind.  I hopped on the
Sessel Chair and noticed that there was a racecourse set up on the skier's left
of Sessel and next to the St. Benard Chair.  From the chair I could easily here
the scraping of edges on ice but found some frozen corn snow right next to the
racecourse.  After a few runs on Sessel I ventured up the Quad Chair to see if
Chair #2 was open (I still have not been on Chair #2 this season).  The top of
Debbie's Gold was plain ugly.  No coverage whatsoever.  I dropped into Ingrid's
Inspiration and found some frozen corn but mostly ice.  Meister was even worse
with whole slabs o' ice.  Basically, the conditions were similar to Bolton
Valley on bad days.

I called Greg to tell him not to bother coming up.  He had spoken to a ski
patroller at Alpental who said that they lost 6 inches of base on Friday.  That
didn't surprise me.  I took about 5 more runs on Sessel until the frozen corn
was skied off and the ventured into the "woods" near the top of the Sessel
Chair.  Big mistake.  At least you could catch an edge once in a blue moon but
not in the "woods".

So I left Alpental at 10:30 and decided to check out the other areas.  Summit
West & Central were pretty busy but the Silver Fir Chair (part of Summit
Central) was empty.  After checking the snow (frozen corn), I decided to take a
run or two as I had never taken the Silver Fir.  My foray down Silver Nugget was
arduous due to the ice but the lift line was not too bad (not ha, ha good
either).  I then took Outback and had a little fun getting some speed.  But I
decided that was enough and headed home.

Rumor has it that the mountains are due to get a 2-3 foot dumping this week so
Greg and I plan on heading up if the rumor holds true.