Got a buddy's condo for the weekend in Winter Park and headed up with a couple friends' families for skiing, drinking, and general relaxation. Plan was for the guys to ski Saturday morning, family skiing Saturday afternoon, girls ski Sunday morning, then more family skiing Sunday afternoon.
So we rousted our $hit together *early* on Saturday so we could get a solid few hours of skiing in before family time. And solid it was... we hit up the Zephyr Express and went straight into the Drunken Outhouse trees. Found all kinds of knee deep stashes in there. What a way to "warm up"...
Second run was over to Mary Jane's chute area. And they'd just opened it. Got in some niiiiiice steep skiing. Conditions in the chutes were a bit of fresh on top of some sun crust nastiness in the first 1/3 followed by the remaining 2/3 of combined untracked & sluffed pow. In the runout area we even dropped what PE might consider a cliff.
Next time up we got up Parsenn and wandered deep into the glades off the ridge and were treated to completely untracked wind deposited shin-knee deep goodies. It almost wasn't steep enough for turns.
Next stop - the hidden goodies at Mary Jane. We wandered around and hit up a really nice steep tree run which again was home to great pockets of knee-thigh deep goodies. And figured since it was so good we should hit it again. Except this time we went into an area which was almost devoid of tracks from the top. And with good reason. We ended up nearly being cliffed and had to negotiate some *really* steep tree run with a bunch of classic Mary Jane "boulders" all over the place. After some survival turns the pitch lessened a bit and we found some PE-cliffs to play on.
Final run was some a$$ hauling down the Winter Park side - nice pushed powder at the edges of the runs as well as goodies in the little patches of trees between runs.
A great morning. The wife got out that afternoon with the boys & then got an early start on Sunday to ski until about 1:00 when I met her and took the boys up for some kid skiing Sunday afternoon.
What a great weekend it was. Pics to follow....
I must be dreaming now...
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