Hope you all had a safe and Happy Xmas, here in Rossland we woke up to 15cm of fresh snow overnight Xmas eve and 25cm over the past 24 hours. This happens most times I’ve been here on Xmas eve and into Xmas day, it didn’t fail me this year either. Its a real joy.
As I said in a earlier post, shoveling the path is a joy, it means we’ll be ski-in fresh line’s 🙂 which on Xmas day is a real present. As all Xmas days there were no line ups, because most of the families etc were opening their prezzie’s. 🙂 From mid day on wards it gets busy.
I’ve been here a week now and the first 5 days it snowed on and off every day overall we got 73cm.
They didn’t open the upper mountain until Boxing day and we were ski-in bottomless powder, 60+cm, it was nice and dry, so a GR8 opening day for the upper mountain.
Above is Granite Mountain the main mountain at Red, Above photo was the first bluebird day on Monday, it has been the same the last 3 days, with Temps between -18 and -20 with no wind.
Today I’m having a day off, its -22 and wind chill -24, a little bit too much for me 🙂 I also need a day off after ski touring for the last two days, its warming to a -15 tomorrow with new snow in the forecast for the next 5 days, hope this cycle continues through the winter.
Above is the Paradise chair, arguably the best aspect to ski on Granite, Its GR8 for all levels of ski-in, a area to learn how to ski the tree’s with good spacing’s between the tree’s getting tighter as you get lower down the slope. We ski tour on mountains around two sides of Paradise and we use this lift as part of our Tour, sometimes its the end of our tour and sometimes its after every run.
Mt Roberts below is one of the back country North facing slope’s, it has a nice steep fall line and covered mostly with tree’s so the snow is well protected and consistent. The lift is in the trees, bottom right corner low down.
Above is Red mountain which was the first mountain to have a ski lift in western Canada in 1947 and was started by two local ski clubs. It was first skied in the 1890’s, their is a statue of Olaus, a Norwegian in the main street, He started the annual winter Carnival which had a race from part of Red mountain down into the town. In the 1890’s Rossland was a gold mining town and was classified a city with 40,000 plus people, now the population is just under 4,000.
Above is another view of Red mountain, (top right half of the photo) taken from Columbia Street which is the main street in Downtown Rossland. It is the south East aspect of Red, the photo above that is the North aspect. The house I live in is above and behind the center buildings.
The pointed mountain left of center is Mt Roberts where we ski tour and we ski from the top down the North facing aspect which you can’t see in the photo, the Paradise chair on Granite is at the bottom of the run.
When I go into the town and look up at that view it amazes and cheer’s me to see that I play in that area even the white peaks of the mountains behind Roberts are part of our ski touring,
Having been here for just a week and I have 11 to go, you can understand, its a real joy being here.
Till next year have a happy and prosperous new year.
let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.
🙂