Sunday, March 02, 2008

Mizpah tele skiing via Ranch Creek

It may be spring in town, but it's winter here

The Ranch Creek slopes
It’s positively spring-like in town.
I’ve begun riding my bike to work some days.
But, don’t let that fool you about snow in the mountains.
The Little Belts are having as good a snow year as I can remember.
A group of us skied the 11-mile Porphyry-Ranch Creek run on Sunday,
stopping to “yo-yo” telemark ski in the Mizpah Bowls.
The snow there was great. Jim Heckel thinks it the best snow he’s ever
backcountry-skied on.
There’s about a foot of new powder on top of a hard, stable base.
It made for some great turns to the Mizpah bottoms, which made for
tough returns to the top.
We’re all getting more creative about car-pooling to the Little Belts.
There were three of us in the car, which friends who were doing O’Brien
Creek, took to the bottom.
I would have preferred to ski Stemple, but O’Brien would have been hard
to beat.
The only ominous sign during the trip was the emerging trees Nancy Dow noticed. That’s a sure sign of spring.
We got a little bit of every kind of weather while on this tour.
On the way back to Kings Hill, we went through a white-out, and the
hill was getting pelted with snow.
Just north of Neihart the snow stopped.
Winter is in its waning days.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'd like to have seen another couple minutes of that run, you were just getting into it when it ended