Saturday & Sunday saw more snow!

Saturday was the first day of the holiday weekend and we were expecting it to be pretty busy, to be honest all weekend was supposed to be busy but in reflection it’s only been busy for Mammoth busy as opposed to normal for Europe busy! The longest I had to queue has been for about 15 minutes today (Monday) at the bottom of South Park. In order to avoid the queues (and get some freshies) Jools and I headed up to Main Lodge first thing in the morning, we actually made it in plenty of time to be the first two riders up the hill on lift 6! Yay for us!

Now it has to be said that I am more of a park monkey than a powder hound, but Jools and I did have fun hitting up some kickers and carving our way through knee deep powder. One of the benefits of powder has to be the fact that it doesn’t hurt when you stack as I ably proved when I caught a heel edge during a huge carve, I didn’t see a large bank of snow left by a Sno-Cat and ended up flying through the air and burying myself…..it’s pretty odd lying in the snow buried with no real idea how deep you are (I’d hate to be caught in an avalanche because a powder slam is disorienting enough). Jools played around trying front flips off the Forest Trail kickers (so the airbag does have it’s uses) and we generally messed around for a few hours.

Then the LA punters came out to play and it started to get messy….picture a bad day at MK Xscape and you’ll be half way there, the scariest thing we saw was “Skier Dad” taking his two skier kids though the Main Unbound Park, riding over the monster kickers and generally looking like a major danger, no change from MK there then ;o)

So we headed down for a restful afternoon of sleep and eating. Oh and in the case of Joe, step jibbing!

Sunday saw more of the same, up for first lift and our first negative encounter with a liftie in Mammoth…yes it’s been two weeks and we’ve only just had a negative liftie experience, not like Europe eh?! Jools and I headed into the lift line ropes, the lifts were running and no one was checking passes, the entrance to the lift mounting point wasn’t blocked off (like it had been pre-lift opening the day before) so we rode forward and were about to be picked up by the lift when a screaming harpie ran out of the hut shouting “The lifts aren’t open, what do you think you’re doing?” Get off, get back” Obviously she’d got out of bed on the wrong side with a hangover. Lets face it if she’d done her job properly and put out the sign and rope across the entrance saying “LIFT CLOSED” then we wouldn’t have been put in potential danger….good job we’re not American or I might have sued!

Still we didn’t let it ruin the morning and Jools and I had another couple of hours hitting kickers in powder, shredding the trees and then heading off home before the crowds .