A rare visit to Snow Summit with high natural snow coverage. I skied some places I hadn't been since 1982 such as the trees between Ego Trip and East Why and the gully from the bottom of Chair 6 to the bottom of Chair 5.

It snowed most of the day on top of the couple of inches from Friday, plus there was some fog up top. The upper mtn. chairs were also windy near the top. I was somewhat underdressed for the weather as Saturday was supposed to a break between two storms.

As I expected, they did a nice job of grooming the hard snow from last Monday's rain. Most runs became almost entirely packed powder as new snow accumulated. The only real boilerplate was on ungroomed and exposed subsurfaces like the top of Dicky's. There was some hardpack from heavy traffic like jump landings in the Westridge terrain park.

There were a ton of people (it sold out before 8AM) but the weather kept a lot of them off the slopes much of the time. With short liftlines I still skied over 25K despite the off-trail explorations and some breaks to search out friends taking lessons.

So where were the crowds? On the roads, waiting 45+ minutes for rentals, the restaurants in the lodges were overrun. The local ski areas have now had over a month of excellent weekend conditions, so they are very busy. The problems can be avoided by showing up extra early and getting rentals, if you need them, ahead of time and not from the ski areas.