Conditions continuing to improve with another 13 cm last night. I skied the past two days and was most impressed with the quality of skiing despite a modest 90 cm base. Our cat drivers are doing a sterling job with little snow and the natural base off paste is nicely dense and well bonded. The only groups of runs not yet open are Wild Side and the double black lines beyond Toilet Bowl. Crowds are up because of the holiday season yet lift lines are quite reasonable, especially when considering there is no singles line and many chairs go with only two occupants due to COVID restrictions. Everyone is wearing their mask in the village and the mountain crew is happy and enthusiastic. It all looks sustainable from where I sit and I think we will have a good season. The point of vulnerability for Apex and all the resorts is staff housing. There are people sharing rooms, so cases will spread fast if one infected person gets in.
Just your basic sunny Apex morning with the valleys below thoroughly socked in. Base just over 100 cm, early season still but the best quality base we've had in a decade or more. No granular sugary weak layer down low, just well bonded and solid all the way to ground. Some fresh in the forecast and all runs are open.
Sunny weekend was nice but now we would like more snow please. Clear night skies produced this beautiful pic by a local photographer though. This is what a mountain with a pitiful 600 m vert and four lifts looks like. So obviously shabby and small, no wonder the tourists give it a miss.
Weather and snow were perfect for our very low key return to racing. Plugged in some timing and printed some start lists and let the kids rip. They were so excited to race after nothing but training for two months. Just our club U12, U14 and U16 groups, 30 in all. They did six runs each both days, plus warmup and slipping, they will be tired little puppies today. Even though the coaches sometimes use transponder timing as a training tool, it's still training and definitely not the same as racing. The kids loved it almost as much as I did. So good to be in the timing room again (by myself of course). First race - skis or bikes - I've been near in a full year. I really missed it. We did this one very minimally, just four volunteers. The coaches were very careful about keeping athlete groups separated and we called each athlete to the start gate last second. All seemed to work OK but it would be hard/impossible to do anything bigger than this under the current restrictions. Kids would love it if we did it again, we'll see.
