Enter The Crowds

The weekend saw school holiday skiers and boarders from Victoria, Queensland and NSW private schools along with the first weekend of the Thredbo Race Club. This together with being a ski and board demo weekend and with limited runs open equalled very crowded slopes.

The snowmaking areas (virtually the only areas open) were great for the first run, good for a couple more runs and then rapidly went off as the manmade packed down and scraped off. Rocks were the worst enemy of all and although they only occurred at the tops of runs you couldn’t avoid at least some of the minefields of little, sharp, P-tex hungry rocks.

The weather, after Friday’s dampness, was magnificent - below zero temps most of the time, with little to no breeze and clear blue skies.

The snow guns continue to pump out vast quantities of snow but we still have “snow inversion” – where the snow is much better at the bottom of the runs than at the top.

The best run for snow quality is Walkabout while Ballroom and Valley View are very scratchy. The bottom of Crackenback and High Noon are very good while Sundowner and the Traverse to the Cat Track are not at all good.

Sunday morning – note new snow gun towers on Lovers Leap Bypass

Guns still blazing on Merritts and High Noon on Sunday morning

There was a very light dusting above 1700m over Saturday night

Supertrail around lunch time when the crowds dispersed

We need more natural snow – looking down towards Tower 10

Supertrail later on Sunday afternoon

High Noon got very slick late in the day

Fresh man-made this morning

Friday Flat – Monday morning starters

The forecast is for some snow tomorrow and again next weekend. We are getting to the point of desperately needing 20-30cm to cover the areas without snowmaking and to take the pressure of the man-made areas. Fingers crossed.

The ski demos were most interesting and I found 4 skis I really liked (a K2, Salomon, Atomic and Rossignol) but all incorporated an integrated binding system so none of my friends or myself will be buying them as we all use Fritschi bindings so we can tour on our alpine skis. It seems a rather stupid and narrow-minded marketing ploy to not allow skiers a choice of binding.