guitar73

Flying here kinda sucks. There are no direct flights from phl and tix are expensive. Big sky is only an hour from the airport, so that's nice. lodging in big sky is not cheap, so its best to go with a group if you can.

We've been starting each day on a south facing aspect and then following the sun around the mtn. that strategy has served us well so far bc its been above freezing during the day and dropping below at nite. today we are planning to hit up moonlight early. def gonna check out the challenger lift area. should be a good time.

Challenger lift is running, but we haven't gotten to it yet...but we may hit that up tomorrow. so far, der impressed with this place even though it's a low snow year. best stuff we found the bowl under the lone peak triple. lots of soft bumps and good steep chutes in there. we also got two tram runs in. yesterday, we did liberty bowl, which was just fabulous.....not as steep as I expected. today we did marx, which is def a bit steeper than liberty, but there were loads of snow bumps in there to help out. lots a rocks and dirt showing thru, but this place is so expansive that it doesn't really matter. just finishing up lunch now, may head over to moonlight basin and cruise the rest of the day.

The slopes were not crowded, but we had to wait 40 mins to get on the tram.

blue bird day and soft snow

We got in about 8:30pm local time. here are some pics of the day. View from our condo

Pre-flight crabbie fries & mussels

cool. yes, this will be our first time going. too bad it's a low snow year for them and the weather forecasts for next week look less than ideal. oh well, can't win them all i suppose, lol.

sounds like gss got more pow at true blue than at jh.....

skis are all packed and ready to go....and yes toast, I packed a camera

there's about 4 inches or so in Norristown.....def still windy. the snow has changed from that slushy stuff to a little more powdery.

super good stuff, yo! thanks for sharing

i was up at montage a couple of weeks ago and conditions were bangin'. I expect that they are still good given the lack of warm temps and they continue to blow snow there.

maybe, but I never said that i'm a bump rockstar....far from it, lol. i'm just sayin' that other PA hills are capable of forming and maintaining decent bumps.

that's not true. both boomer (montage) and tunkhannock (elk) are not very steep and they bump up just fine without being seeded. i'd say that nightmare is about the same grade at boomer and tunks. ETA: bumps will form on shallow slopes as well....just their shapes will be different b/c the turns that form them are shaped slightly different.

true, but places like montage and elk, heck...even jack frost, do a much better job with bumps. first, they don't make fake bumps. they just blow the crap out of the trails and not groom it. yes, it's man-made snow and yes it forms hard east coast bumps....but at least those bumps have natural shape and rhythm, unlike what happens at blue. just sayin'.

barnie's bumps are pretty much it. sometimes they have some on nightmare....and those are better than barnie's, but not by much.

everyone knows that the bumps at blue suck....they are always rock hard. elk and montage have much better bumps for PA standards.

wow, just wow.....

nice stuff.....castlerock is the bomb. but don't overlook paradise, there's some good stuff in there as well.

dude, that sucks. hope you heal quickly!

I gotta say, there is something strangely cathartic about clearing a slalom gate, lol....

the first session was all drills/application/etc, but ppl in the class were super into do gates.

tinymoose isn't overly fond of boarders for this same reason....

yup. basically they were looking to make sure that your hands don't really drop below your waist or get behind your torso. but more than that, they didn't want us to have "static" hands/arms thru the turn. they wanted us to have a little bit of forward movement of the outside arm to help keep the upper body driving thru all of the turn. also, the timing of the pole plant they had us working on was slightly after the edge transition. ETA: here is a video of what i'm trying to explain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9wjBFf_g6U