Arapahoe Basin
07 June 1997

Weather

Started warm and sunny .. By mid morning it clouded over and started to rain just before midday.

Conditions

Spring conditions (no overnight freezing).

Overall

On 20th April, at Vail, I resigned myself to my last skiing of the season.

However, here I was, at the beginning of June, with a weekend to spare and still skiing at Arapahoe Basin in Colerado. In 1993, I skied Alpine Meadows on 5th June, so this was the latest ever!

The trip from Boston was not very pleasant. Flights to Chicago were a little late because of storms around the airport. The flight to Denver touched down, almost on time, but in the middle of a thunderstorm. For 30 minutes we waited, until they declared it safe to recommence ground operations at the gates.

Getting the rental car left me soaked and I headed up I-70 in torrential rain. The windscreen wipers could not cope and there were several areas where the road was flooded and temporarily visibility was cut to zero. Nearing the pass at Eisenhower Tunner, the rain changed to sleet, and almost instantly condensation made it impossible to see anything. Frantic wiping made little difference and it was with some relief that I got into the tunnel and the air conditioning started to make an impact.

Saturday morning started warm and sunny with hardly a cloud in the sky. The main fear was of sunburn rather than anything else. There had been no snow at A-Basin, even at the summit it had rained, but there was still plenty of snow, and top to bottom skiing.

The Palivaccini area was closed; even from a distance, the bare areas could be seen. Apart from that, most of the resort was still open.

The top of Lenawee lift early in the day	Looking down to the valley from the top of the Lenawee lift
The groomed trail across the ridge from Lenawee lift	Exhibition lift took me to the mid mountain area and then Lenawee to the summit at just over 13000 feet. The first run proved seriously challenging. At the top, the snow looked reasonably groomed and further down it looked cut up, but not too difficult. From the top, the groomed run was soft and by no means flat. From the middle, the ungroomed bowl area was very heavy, even at 8:30am. The first run was not good. I lacked confidence and skied from turn to turn, driven by the terrain, rather than linking turn and going where I wanted to go. I ended up in a narrow glade, with bare patches and had to back up slowly to get out of trouble.
	Open bowl skiing - taken from Lenawee lift
"High Altitude Skiing"	Back up Lenawee and a more cautious, and more successful run. This time I skied the top section much more aggressively and took the groomed road back to the lift.
Norway Face (from Lenawee Lift)	Norway Face (From Lenawee Lift)
There are two almost parallel runs to the almost the same height. This time, I tool Norway and turned right at the top towards the West Wall. The first section was a little hairy, narrow, mogulled and rather steeper than it looked. The rest of the bowl was not easy but I went more or less where I intended. Back up Norway and this time I turned left down Powerline, part of Norway face.	The top of Lenawee Chair
Glade skiing off Lenawee lift	The skiing of Lenawee was much more interesting, so I returned to that side of the mountain and took two runs down the narrow, mogulled Falcon chute. Both runs finished with a short wooded section before the run out to the lift. Now it was time for a break, so another ride up Lenawee followed by a top-to-bottom run brought me back to the base area. The runs below the mid mountain area were in surprisingly good condition, soft, but not skied out.
What a difference one hour makes. An earlier photograph taken from the same place shows blue skies and a few scattered white clouds. Just one hour later, the sky is heavily overcast and extremely menacing. By the time I had finished a short break, tried and failed to phone home, the weather had taken a turn for the worse. Clouds had got up and visibility was pretty flat. I went back up to the top and took three more runs before it started to rain. By the time I got to the bottom, it was raining heavily and I gave up for the day.	Norway Face (from Lenawee Lift)

All-in-all a very satisfactory, if short, session.

Runs

Last updated: 13/07/97