It’s been an unnaturally warm, windy, and dry winter in southwest Montana. Pre-season, the weather guys couldn’t stop talking about how this “La Nina” winter was going to bring more banner snowfall, cold temps, and winter conditions to much of the northwestern part of the country. That prediction has failed miserably. Bridger Bowl has received 88″ of snow to date, and Big Sky isn’t much better at 127″. Snowpacks in the area are running at around 70-80% of their usual depths at this time of the year. To say that the area needs snow badly is an understatement.

Despite the lack of new snow and the continued failure of the weather forecasters to predict anything close to the correct forecast, the snow that we have received is skiing pretty well. I worked out of the Bowl at Big Sky on Sunday and, despite the 30-40mph wind gusts that rocked the lift station, the skiing was great. The Triple, Shedhorn, and Dakota all went on windhold for most of the day, leaving the 20+ skiers who happened to be uphill from the Tram at 10:45AM as the only ones able to access it for the rest of the day. Bowl and Summit patrols and those lucky 20 essentially had their own private 11,000′ mountain to ski for the day. The high winds were buffing out the snow constantly and moving it around so that each run was on smooth, grippy hero snow. Great stuff.

The forecast for the foreseeable future looks like more of the same, but as long as it doesn’t deteriorate, I’m more than happy with what we have on the mountain.

View 1.29.2012 Big Sky in a larger map

Bridger was eerily similar to the East Coast today. The snow on the lower mountain was very heavy and wind-affected. Anywhere that the wind was able to scour was scraped down to hardpack and was almost unskiable. I hiked up B-Route once to Sluice Box. It was a gorgeous bluebird day and the views from the top of the Ridge stretched from the Tobacco Roots to the Crazies and the Absarokas. The skiing improved the farther down I skied. The upper narrow part of the route was heavy, clumpy snow that rapidly lightened and became much more skiable. Well worth the 1st trip up the bootpack but not necessarily worth a return trip.

There’s a couple of inches of snow in the forecast for the area over the weekend which might do a lot to freshen up the snow. However, we still need big storms and lots of them.

View 1.27.2012 Bridger in a larger map

I drove up to Bridger Bowl this morning for my first day there this season. It snowed for a while overnight and Bridger was reporting 7″ this morning. Conditions were very soft, deep in places, and rocky in places. South Bowl was a minefield with good snow covering bare rocks. I only managed to ski one run before the power went out to all of Bridger Canyon. I was halfway up Pierre’s Knob and made it to the top on the diesel backup.

Patrol had no idea when power would be back so I raced up the Fingers bootpack ahead of the crowds for one run down the 3rd Finger. Only one person had been down before me and I took an alternate route through some tight trees and scored knee-to-waist deep powder down the entire chute. My legs were toast from a full patrol day at Big Sky the day before and the bootpack was jammed up so I headed home.

View 1.22.2012 Bridger in a larger map

Driving up Gallatin Canyon on my way to work this morning, I was despondent. at 6:30 AM the temperature was 42F and it was pouring rain. Very much par for the course for this winter. Last week a strong storm pounded Montana, delivering record snowfall in most of the major cities. Bozeman and the surrounding area recorded under an inch of snow.

Lone Peak, however, was operating under its own weather system. I turned onto the access road and immediately the rain turned to snow and intensified. I crawled up the road at about 15 mph because it was snowing so heavily that I couldn’t see much more beyond my headlights. This pounding snow continued all day until about 1pm and then resumed at 2pm.

The Andesite complex was skiing extremely well all morning, with about 4-5″ inches of heavy powder on top of the groomed terrain from the night before. As the day went on the temperature dropped and the snow got lighter and fluffier and the skiing improved. I spent the afternoon at Shedhorn and the glades and trails were skiing incredibly, albeit with some areas of thin cover. All in all, an excellent sleeper powder day.

Driving back down the canyon at the end of the day, the snow at Big Sky turned to rain in the canyon and then back into a blizzard around the Lava Lake bridge. It’s still snowing heavy, wet flakes in town. Tomorrow should be just as good.

In a non-skiing related tone, I edited all the images in this post with the just-released public beta of Lightroom 4. Although I’m not fully switched over to it yet (and likely won’t switch until it’s officially released and I can import and convert my Lightroom 3 library), I’m pretty excited about the new beta. Adobe’s Tom Hogarty has a pretty good interview on the changes and new features here, but in my brief experience with it so far the newly tuned sliders seem much improved and the mapping function is pretty neat. I’m also excited about the inline video viewing and editing tools that this version provides.

January

I was home for Christmas vacation and went to a Bruins game before heading back to Montana.

February

I skied ALOT in February, including a backcountry trip to Mt. Blackmore in the northern Gallatin Range.

March

In March I took my first trip to Grand Teton National Park and met up with Scott Hotaling (Light of the Wild) for some skiing and early sunrises.

April

It snowed pretty much the entire month of April at Big Sky Resort and I skied more days than I ever have in a single month.

May

In May I drove cross-country from Montana to Massachusetts and saw this epic double rainbow as a huge thunderstorm was clearing in eastern South Dakota.

June

June was the first month I spent splitting my time at an apartment in Cambridge, MA. Living in “the city” was a great experience and I really enjoyed my time there. Plus, the Bruins won the Stanley Cup!

July

July was HOT. I spent time in York Beach, ME and Martha’s Vineyard.

August

In August I drove back to Montana from Massachusetts and stopped at Stonehenge in Nebraska.

September

I spent every weekend in September in Yellowstone National Park and Grand Teton National Park exploring and shooting wildlife and landscapes.

October

I spent the month of October shooting cyclocross races across Montana.

November

In November I finally met up with a group of photographers from NSOP to shoot the sunrise at Elephant Rock in Westport, MA.

December

Christmas! Spent the holidays visiting the Newport Mansions and spending time with family at home on Cape Cod.

I also tried out a new iPhone app today, Ski Tracks, which is a GPS recorder optimized for skiing. It records information on each run, total vertical skied, top speeds, and allows me to export a KML file (seen embedded above) into Google Earth or Maps. It’s also really easy on my battery. On my Droid the GPS Tracks app would kill the battery over the course of an hour or two and had to be run in Airplane Mode if I wanted any hope of recording the day. Ski Tracks is to not use very much energy from the phone and I was able to ski for several hours and only lose about 10% of my available battery life. Pretty sweet.

Quick test of the video recording capability of the iPhone 4S…full 1080p video from a phone!

5-7″ of fresh, very low density snow fell on Big Sky overnight and when I finally made it to the mountain at around 1:30PM everyone I talked to on the lift was stoked on how the mountain was skiing. The Lone Peak Triple and the Bowl terrain opened up mid-afternoon on December 3rd and by mid-afternoon on the 4th it was still skiing great.

There were tracks everywhere and tons of patches of rocks uncovered. Having a general knowledge of where the rock bands are in the Bowl is key to surviving early season at Big Sky and there were clearly tons of people who had no idea where to ski. The smart line was to traverse across to Mary’s Bush and ski down below the rock band. I skied soft, deep turns there for most of the afternoon on Sunday

The rest of the terrain on the mountain was skiing really well, too. Ambush was getting poached constantly all day and skiing great. All the terrain that was scrapy and icy on Friday was packed powder and skiing great on Sunday. The 5-7″ of fresh made a huge difference in how Big Sky is skiing.

We appear to be set up into a storm-every-Wednesday-and-Saturday cycle and it looks to be continuing into this week. Hopefully these two forecasted storms turn out big and provide as much of a boost as this past weekend did.

I also tried out Microsoft’s Photosynth app on Sunday. Photosynth is an app to create interactive panoramas from an iPhone. It provides a guided interface for taking photos and stitching them into a panorama and a website for displaying the panoramas in an explorable interface. It’s really easy to use and the stitching algorithms appear to be excellent so far. I made two panoramas on Sunday, one of the Big Sky base area and one from CJ Road looking towards Lone Peak and the A-Z Chutes.

Today was my first day of skiing for the 2011-2012 Ski Season. We’ve had a very dry and dangerous early season in southwest Montana. A couple early season storms left a nice layer of facets that’s present just about everywhere. This deep instability has made backcountry skiing very dangerous.

After the early season storms, the clouds dried up and Big Sky opened Thanksgiving Day with only two lifts (Ramcharger and the Explorer Double) and very limited terrain. It’s finally started snowing more regularly, however, and in the past couple days they’ve added Swift Current and 7 more trails.

Today, the snow report’s claim of “variable” conditions was definitely correct. THe mostly man=made snow on Tippy’s Tumble was extremely slick hardpack. Mr. K and the lower mountain had good, soft, skiable snow. Crazy Horse had very thin cover with large chunks of rock everywhere.

Big Sky (and the region) desperately needs snow to improve conditions and safety. These long-range predictions were released today and certainly point to the type of weather that we need.

It was snowing hard for the couple of hours that I was there and I wasn’t able to get a glimpse of the upper mountain, but the Bowl Triple was turning for a bit. 191 through Gallatin Canyon was starting to get snow-covered when I drove back through Bozeman. It was snowing heavily in the canyon, as well.