I'm a powder hound, which means I don't just "ski" -- I wait for the conditions to be right. I watch out for powder alerts, read detailed mountain weather forecasts, look at pass conditions, and check hourly mountain weather reports (temps, precipitation, wind speed, snow accumulation, etc.). I usually wait until the last minute to decide whether I'm going to ski, and where. It doesn't bother me at all to go alone because as we say (in my powder hound posse): "on a powder day you have no friends". Hey, my time is valuable and I don't get to ski much -- so I want to optimize each hour on the slopes!
Yesterday I allowed myself the luxury of playing a few hours of hooky in favor of hitting Alpental first thing in the morning. I knew the low freezing levels combined with lots of precipitation, on a weekday, would make for a very strong "quality vertical skiing per hour" score (which translates to how much kickass skiing you can get per hour, measured in feet of vertical drop).
The snow was outstanding, the lift lines were almost nonexistent, the temperature remained cold and I was getting fresh tracks on every run! I only needed 3 hours of continuous skiing to get a ton of vertical and be absolutely wiped, then it was back to the office.
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