A little snow, and Bridger news
October 3rd, 2008Posted in Skiing Everywhere
The National Weather Service is prediciting a chance of snow in the rainy weather they say will dominate the Tetons this weekend. Radar shows a large mass of precipitation coming ashore over Oregon, so the odds are the higher elevations will get a whitening.
It wasn’t too many years ago that Targhee picked up a couple of feet of snow around this time and I broke out the x-c gear to enjoy it. I didn’t think the rocks were sufficiently covered to not chew up the bases on my downhill skis. Because the snow from that storm never melted away, it ended up forming a lousy base layer and aggravated the avalanche scene for a long time. I’m hoping we get a normal progression of snowfalls this fall, so the real lasting snow coverage doesn’t start until November, no matter how exciting it is to see the mountains turn white before then.
There’s lots of work left to do over on the Jackson side to get the new tram completed on time, so early snow storms are probably not going to be welcome there. As expected, the marketing folks are successfully milking the construction and efforts to get it completed by December for all they can. You’d think they had never had a tram before! Nor any other ski had one either. I think when I was in Zermatt a few years ago they had eleven of them!
More exciting to me, is the new lift Bridger Bowl is finishing up. It is a cool lift on a number of levels. Unlike the re-traming at Jackson, this lift opens up 300+ acres of new terrific terrain. It makes access to portions of famous Bridger’s Ridge easier. It offers the option of decent vertical and decent length runs on challenging terrain for skiers who just want to enjoy riding a lift instead of hiking for exciting turns. It’s a recycled lift! It was formerly Snowbird’s Peruvian lift. And it will make my two sons very happy since they will be using it a lot this winter. Kudos to the folks at Bridger for daring to install an experts only lift and for making this nifty little promo video to show off the new terrain.
Leave a Comment