Day 29 - Thursday Feb 14 - Valentine's Day

My dear wife is certainly my valentine, but coming up in second place this year is skiing (no offense, mom). I was worried that this past week was going to have a long lasting negative affect on the snow pack. This was not the case. We got dumped on yesterday afternoon through this morning which made for some pretty great snow. I met Matt and his friend, Ben, at the mouth of Little at 5:25 (we were all running a little late due to the weather). We all drive 2-wheel drive cars and I happened to be the only one with chains so it was my turn to drive up the canyon. I was very pleased to see that the White Pine parking lot had been plowed already this morning. I was half expecting to have to drive right past it and park and ski somewhere up near Alta. Instead, we were the first car to arrive in White Pine. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Allow me to explain... a good thing because we were going to get the first choice of turns up there; a bad thing because we had to break trail and none of us were familiar enough with the area to be super confident we could even find the trail. Well, we were right. Breaking wasn't all that bad, but we got lost several times trying to find the right place to lay the skin track. I kept saying that I thought we were too low, but they thought we were too high (later we found out we were too low, but I don't say this to boast). We did finally get to the Pink Pine ridge and we were on our way. There was a group of three dudes right behind us that had cut the correct skin track but were still unable to completely catch up in order to get first tracks. While skinning up the ridge we saw some interesting things happening with the snow. The wind was blowing from the east which was loading the northwesterly aspects. The top layer of new snow would crack, but nothing would move. We took this into account as we chose our line. We skied one of the first skiable lines off the ridge on a northeasterly aspect. The skiing was fantastic just like it has been all year. We were getting face shots on every turn again. This was very reassuring after the snow we dealt with over the weekend. We skied down to the skin track then headed up for another. The three dudes skied down behind us and headed back to their car. Then two old guys past us as we were transitioning. We caught up with them on the skin track, but we skied different lines. The second line was just as good as the first. I simply cannot complain. I had a great morning making some sweet turns. Happy Valentines Day to all and to all a good day.