This ski season started off with a bang the likes that hasn’t been seen in quite a while. An impressively powerful storm rolled in at the end of opening day last Sunday, dropping 30″ of snow in just a few days. Lauren and I pulled in to the parking lot Tuesday morning to snow falling at about 2″ per hour.

Patrol opened some new terrain (Upper Richard’s) and we missed the rope drop, but still got some boot-deep turns that made it feel like mid-winter. Dustin, Loveland‘s marketing manager, was out taking photos, and got a couple of us as well. Lauren:

And myself:

It was a cold day, feeling like a full-on winter Loveland storm. I forgot to bring any sort of face protection, had to go in a couple times to warm back up, and ultimately called it a day in mid-afternoon.

We were back on Thursday, when even more terrain was open. We caught the rope drop for Spillway, and shredded the fresh cord, then found plenty of cut-up-but-soft snow on Nix Nox.

Lauren enjoyed it as well.

After an incredibly restful (read: lazy) day Friday, we went back up on Saturday, and even more terrain was open – including chair 6. Despite the warm temps over the past few days, things were still soft in the morning – thanks to a lack of a hard freeze.

Most of the crew was out yesterday, and it was great to ski with all the people I hadn’t seen in a while. We were rolling at least a dozen deep, as it was Larry’s birthday party day.

I’ll be back up sometime this week, for day 5 – something that took me until December 19 last year. Unfortunately there’s nothing but warm and dry in the forecast, but it’ll come in time. Until then, we’ll have fun on what’s there, work on strength and technique, and dream of big storms.