Thursday, February 4, 2021

Powder Day

A beautiful rodent dive from Rudy for today's comical entertainment:

"Incoming!" demonstrates beautiful rodent diving Rudy.
What's Jack looking at? Well, not a moose, he's watching another
skier fly down the fresh powder to our right.
"Fascinating! I can do that!" says Jack.

We got our first real "super storm" of the season last night. As a result, we went to our favorite "powder trails" on steep Baldy Mountain. As you see in the prior photo, we followed others up Baldy in the track being shared by everyone going uphill. Once you climb up Baldy on the shared trail, you have the whole mountain of powder to select your own way back down! Jack & Rudy had a blast breaking trail in over 15 inches of fresh powder high up on Baldy:

The powder power twins towing me through 15+ inches of powder!
POW!

Since you are near or above treeline on Baldy, you encounter many wind-blown drifts. As we approached one wind drift over 3 feet tall, Rudy paused slightly to let leader Jack take over and show how to plow through the drift.

Impressive Jack plowing through a 3 foot drift!
"Got it! Coming, coming!" says Rudy taking off to plow too.

Today's video highlight shows three levels of skijoring all in a one minute clip. The clip starts with Jack & Rudy breaking trail in 15ish inches of fresh powder. After about 15 seconds, we connect onto a trail we set on the way up. We are still "kicking up powder" as only myself, Jack & Rudy had been in this stretch of snow. Finally, about 45 seconds in and we connect onto more packed main trail and off we go. Fun powder day! Breaking trail, kicking up powder and fast flooring it all in one day!

[watch on youtube if no video loads below]

Once you get back into the thick trees, everyone uses the same trail again. With the snow so deep today, all the humans were sharing a very narrow single track up & down. I noticed this on the way up and knew it was too narrow for Jack & Rudy to fit comfortably on the way down. So, I skied just outside the set track the entire way up to build a mini-track for one of Jack or Rudy on the way down. Perfect results!

Rudy running fast in the main track while Jack it easily keeping pace
using the adjacent track I set on the way up. Good job human :)

End of a fun powder day as Zorro looks on as we arrive at the trailhead.

"Nice form kids. Good job!" says onlooking Zorro.
"Hi Zorro!!!!!" adds glancing Jack :)

A perfect powder day on the trails. I think this is the first time this season I can say one of my favorite lines, "We were happily slowed by deep snow!" 6 miles traveled with 900 feet of elevation climbed and a top speed of 18 MPH.

2020-2021 Season to Date: 75 days on the trails covering 600.3 miles with 52,700 feet of elevation climbed.


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