Today, 1.14.16, Maestra, the other snowboarder named T. Rice, and I went storm skiing on Ferry West.  There was 6″ of fresh down low and a healthy foot up high.  Winds out of the W were blowing a lot of snow around at upper elevations. Winds were light down low.

An additional 2″ fell on the car between 11am and 3pm while we were out there.  It was coming in pretty dense and filling things in nicely.  The old skintrack was easy to find down low and totally buried up high.

On the descent we found supporting but bottomless hero snow above 8000′ and increasingly annoying suncrusts under a few inches of fresh at lower elevations on WSW aspects.  Snow seemed pretty tasty top to bottom on shady slopes but is still thin on all aspects at lower elevations.

Visibility was poor up high but the clouds puking snow were thin enough that things were still casting shadows.  It wasn’t a complete vertigo situation in the open sections of Broken Nose.

I haven’t put out a snow report since 2015 although I did ski the Beer Pong Echelon up in Jackson’s Hole a few times shortly after the New Year before catching a nasty case of the crud.

We put the skin track in both times and found overgrowth running rampant on the approach.  It seems that peak has faded back into the mists of time, which is fine because we ran into several mama moose with babies that really didn’t appreciate our intrusions: I doubt I’ll be back there this year so those moose have their space.

That said, Beer Pong was skiing pretty darn good despite the big slide that took off its SSE cap but looked to have only ran half path.  We got a good look at the crown and it was impressive.  It apparently popped on the 24th on a slippery suncrust on the SSE slope at ~9300′.

Extreme cold days down low gave me a bit of frostnip in the toes and then I caught the Christmas/chemtrail/kiddo/??? crud real bad, so I had to take a week off.  What felt like a multitude of sinus and lung infections were draining me and wouldn’t let up to the point that I went to the doctor and spent a whopping $204 for 20 grams of amoxicillin, aka penicillin.  Apparently, I could get the pills online for $0.13 apiece so the minute and a half I spent with the doctor to get a prescription was apparently the most expensive part.

Due to down days I’m out of the loop regarding the snowpack and am easing back into things to prevent a relapse of crud, so snow reports will be spotty and suspect for the next week or so.  Tomorrow I might take it easy and explore the lower S flanks of Brad Peak in preparation for hopefully putting a skinner in to the top of the Rake.  Yee haw!