Sunday, January 1, 2012

Crisp The Redeemer

The snow came, the snow went...all told it added up to a couple of millimeters...3...4 tops. Americans, that's just a little shy of an eighth of an inch.

The road up to My Mountain was Gretzky City. I parked and walked crunching on the melted frozen snow, to the shop. There was a little dust showing, and the old snow sparkled with freshly formed surface crystals.

The swing shift guys were in pretty good spirits...snowmakers too. They hadn't blown any snow, but they were ready...guns, fans, and hoses were deployed across the mountain waiting for the thermometer to lose a couple more degrees...

The swing shift groomers tag-teamed a big winch project...Robbing Peter to pay Paul. The winchcat pulled a couple of feet off a trail fat with manmade snow up to it's problem child neighbor, and spread it over all the outstanding obstacles...boulders mostly.

I arrived at the scene of the crime about two hours after swing shift finished working their magic. All the misery of my previous night dissolved into relief...joy almost...the temps began to fall once the last of the clouds passed. I pushed the bounty around for three hours...a little of it I pushed uphill a couple of hundred yards to some other trouble spots. Finally laying on the corduroy, the trail looked like a debutante at her Coming Out Soirée. Snowmaking fired up around 0400...

As it turns out, the snowmaking was a psychological victory more than a strategic victory...still the hard freeze did wonders for every acre we're currently offering to our guests.

I even had to regroom our best trail after snowmaking made some pastel brown snow on top of my early shift corduroy...I was happier than a Pig in Poo to be re-rolling it! Last night fades into diffuse memory...never to gain a discreet place at my table again!

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