The above photo was taken on New years eve, a beautiful end to 2021 especially ski-in the 60 cm of dry snow through the tree’s for 4 days at the end of the year.
In the last photo of my last post which was taken from the town looking up at Mt Roberts and Red Mountain. Mt Roberts is on the right of the beautiful tree in the above photo and the ridge line I’m standing on is the white peaks mentioned in that post behind Roberts.
Granite mountain is on the left of the tree and the ski area you can see is called Paradise and the lift goes from the bottom of Roberts and up the sunny south facing slope to the top of Granite.
The day before new years eve I went touring with two friends Dan and Gretski along the ridge line in the top photo and we skied down through the tree’s ( above photo),its a nice long run down to Roberts Creek and we then skin back up onto Mt Roberts and skied down the North face of Roberts to the Paradise lift and then home.
I’ve been here two weeks now and its feels like I’ve never been away, I’ve skied 10 days and 9 of them I’ve been ski-in fresh lines in 60cm of dry Powder. I’ve skied more pow days this season here than I did in the whole of last winter in NZ and I still have 11 more weeks of ski-in here 🙂
Yesterday we had 21 cm overnight and after ski-in fresh lines in Paradise till 11, I then skinned up Mt Roberts ( 30 min’s) and skied the North facing tree’s which they call DL’s who is a good friend and local man who is a Liverpool supporter and actually from Liverpool too 🙂
One of my favorite lines in the tree’s is DL’s Alley ( above photo), it is a nice steep slope all the way to the Paradise ski area and with the new 21 cm of snow on top of 60cm already there I was ski-in 70+cm, also this year because of covid there are not many people here and not many touring either so there are fresh lines every day backcountry. I did three run’s through the tree’s and each run is a 50 minute loop.
After ski-in till 10-30 in Paradise today I caught up with Dan in the paradise lodge and we went up Mt Roberts again and we did two awesome runs from the top, one called the dog leg and the other the Y chute and the photo above is halfway down the run. After the two runs we decided to head home.
Meanwhile back at home as you can see by the photo below which I took before I went ski-in yesterday the snow is building up on the Hedge and when I came home at the end of the day the one on the left had fallen off and half the snow on the right was on the ground too, in the photo below that.
Above is the hedge now with most of the snow gone.
It always reminds me of a piece of Xmas cake with icing on it :-).