Thursday, February 20th - Fernie Alpine Resort - 4 inches new snow

On Thursday, Ben, Greg, and Chris took the day off from skiing. They were going to look around the Fernie Alpine Village and head into the city of Fernie as well. That left James, Weston, and I to head out and do the skiing. I was really interested in checking out the Knot Chutes, and we expected them to be open at this point. As a bonus, the mountain had received another 10 cm of snow (~4 inches) which meant that the surface would be freshened up for us. We got up the White Pass Quad via the Timber Bowl Quad, but found that the ridge sporting the Knot Chutes was all socked in with clouds. To get up to the chutes, it meant a hike up the ridge in poor visibility. I'm not a big fan of running around above tree line in an area I don't know, especially in a whiteout. James and Weston seemed even less enthusiastic. So instead of taking chances up there, we cut in just below the chutes where the visibility was fine, and skied some of the untracked powder. The four inches of new snow gave a nice coating and some sweet turns. It wasn't quite enough snow to refresh the really steep terrain, but I thought it might be fun to hit the sides of some of the groomed runs. A few inches of fresh powder over groomed is one of my favorite surfaces, and we had a lot of fun making turns on the groomed back to the base.

Since we didn't get to hit the Knot Chutes, we decided to go for another item on our list, checking out Snake Ridge. Since getting out to the end of the traverse actually required a bit of a hike, we figured it might be a good place for fresh snow. Once we'd made our way to the gate. We talked with a patroller who filled us in on the types of signs they used. The one at this gate indicated that the area was open, and that we were still in bounds. We passed some patrollers studying the snowpack with a pit, and eventually found ourselves at a second gate. This gate was the ski area boundary, and beyond that was the Fish Bowl. The top of the ridge actually had a fairly well worn cat track, but there appeared to be a lot of fresh snow in the Gorbie Bowl area. We started in from the top and it was definitely awesome! These were definitely the longest untracked runs we got in our time at Fernie, and they were both steep and deep! We even had plenty of time to pull out the cameras since the traffic in the upper regions was so light.

After catching the T-Bar, we tried the Kangaroo Trail, which was actually quite steep with big bumps. The snow was a little heavy, and there were a couple of rocks poking through, but generally it seemed like a nice option for some challenging terrain if you're heading back to the base from the T-Bar. For a change of pace, we rode the Boomerang Triple instead of heading all the way back to the base. Since I'd seen the amazingly steep trails (like Boomerang and Boomerang Ridge) on my 1st day at Fernie, I'd wanted to ski them. While heading down the trail Boomerang on our next run, I eventually made the connection that it was one of the steep trails I'd seen. Each turn felt like it consisted of 10 feet of vertical drop, that great free fall feeling that makes steep terrain so much fun. Eventually, we caught the Cedar Trail back to the base and called it a day, but I knew we would try to return to the great skiing we'd found on Snake Ridge.

Upon our return, we got some reports from the others who hadn't skied that day. They had looked around the village for interesting watering holes, but hadn't really come up with much. They had visited the Grizzly Bar, which they said was pretty rank, as well as the Powderhorn Grill. I guess they did get some Honey Browns at the Powderhorn, and they watched a bit of sports on TV, but later that evening when a group of us went out in the village, there was nothing at all going on. So, if you're staying at the village, don't expect too many choices for drinking, going to the city itself seems to be the thing to do. For dinner, Ben whipped up some great Fajitas, and we were even able to figure out the conversion from cups to milliliters (more or less). Eventually we did head back downtown for more Foosball and pool, and all the while we were happy to see that it continued to snow. My personal favorite was once again when we got home and played 4-man Xbox; it was a shame that the Xbox... er I mean WE, had to leave the next day.