like night and day

What a difference a week makes - a week with no new snow, anyway.  Whereas last Saturday was full of deep, fluffy, puffy new snow, this Saturday was hard and fast, last weekend's powder wind-driven and packed down.  Although the temperatures were pretty nice (mid 20s/high teens), we got cold because we just weren't working hard as we cruised the groomers.  And cruising the groomers was necessary: the ungroomed snow was ridged and unyielding, although you could get an edge into it (or could if you had any edges on your skis - remind me to get my skis tuned), and I bounced off the solid ridges, which was tough on the knees.

Looking back at the Gunsight

We hung out at Supreme for a fair amount of time, even venturing into Catherine's Area via the Supreme Bowl traverse, which had been all but filled in with the week's wind.  I struggled in Catherine's, skis just breaking through the snow's surface enough to make it difficult for me to turn.

Happy to have found some soft snow

At lunch at Alf's, we noticed a very few skiers coming down through Greeley Bowl.  Since the traverse across East Greeley was closed, we figured they were taking the High Traverse on the front side and coming up over the ridge.  The snow in Greeley Bowl looked good and H declared that he wanted to give it a try.  Since the High Traverse gives me pause even in excellent conditions, I opted out and took 2.5 runs off Collins on the front side while H hiked up and over and came back around to find me.  He ended up coming over the ridge through Gunsight (which we hadn't done before) and reported that the snow and views were quite good in the Bowl.

The view from high up in Greeley Bowl

We did a couple of runs down on Sunspot/lower West Rustler, finding the snow fairly soft but the area popular: everyone else was finding that snow fairly soft too.  It wasn't really crowded, though, since there were very few people out skiing probably due to lack of new snow/last minute holiday shopping.  We called it a day a little after 2 p.m. and headed home, looking forward to the inch or so of snow the forecast was promising for Sunday.