Mammoth: January 2012: Day 3

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Sometime in the middle of the night, the pouring rain turned into snow! Add in the smell from bacon cooking for breakfast and the day was off to a wonderful start.

Well, except for one tiny detail: all that pouring rain the night before? It turned to ice and closed all the lifts, forcing Mammoth to delay opening lots of the lifts as they scraped the ice off. Good thing we slept in, 'cause by 10:45am they only had three lifts running on the entire mountain! This improved significantly by lunchtime, but as lifts slowly opened, some (such as Chair 4) had waits of up to 40 minutes. Ouch.

Basically, more than half the lower runs opened up, though, which was pretty awesome. Conditions went from "I see dirt" to snow everywhere. 2 feet in the weekend's storm (more than 4 feet total) while we were there significantly helped! Even if the base is still very thin, this was more than enough for decent coverage at the base. Sadly the top was still closed due to winds and avalanche risk.

Did Chinese New Year's Eve Eve dinner that night. Beef and broccoli, chow mein, and chicken-- hey, it may not have been traditional, but we had to improvise! Angie did all the hard work, too (thanks Angie!), Cheston and I mostly served as kitchen whelps. t'was delicious! The chocolate brownies and ice cream for dessert were also awesome. Between Howard, Hileen, Tiffany, Victory, Angie, and myself, the tray almost vanished completely!

Wrapped up the night mostly hanging around with at least one other friend also in Mammoth, and don't ask what movie we watched...