March 8, Day 1 Big Sky

Since none of us had to pay for lift tickets, as Francine and Kristin are employees at a sister resort to Big Sky, The Summit at Snoqualmie, we signed on with the First Tracks Half Day Guided private.  We were able to load the chair at 8am, one hour before the general public, and had priority loading on the lifts for 4 hours.  It was an amazing day.  Curt, our guide was great and we had 3-4 totally untracked runs on the groomers.  We started out on Calamity Jane.  Then a tree run off Calamity Jane.  Then another tree run off the skiers right of Calamity Jane.  The 8-Seater Ram Charger Express was having loading issues, and the folks that paid for First Track Breakfast where they only got 1 hour of skiing before the general public on the RamCharger, were doing a lot of standing around.  Luckily our 1/2 day guided private allowed us to ski other chairs, so we lucked out.

At 9am, after the lifts opened for the public, the lines were quite long, as the 8-Seater Ram Charger still wasn't loading and the Swift 4 Express had lines.  So, Curt opted to skirt around the base area, walk, and finally skate down the road to the Thunder Wolf High Speed.  Here, we had the worst run of the day, as the run straight under the lift was sun affected from the warm 40 degrees the previous day.  At least it had 3-4 inches on the firm bumps.

We made our way down Spotted Elk, which was another bump run with a few inches on it.  On to the Tram which holds 15 people.  We got there around 10:10am, and it had just opened 5 minutes earlier.  We had to wait our turn at the "special access" waiting area, as another private group was ahead of us.  They let the private groups in every other tram (blue tram), which cut us in front of the general public.  We go up some back stairs for our priority loading (similar to Jackson Hole, where the lessons & private groups cut the tram line.)  Next, we head for the Patrol Shack to sign in.  We opted for the North Summit Snowfields, instead of the Big Couloir, as only Kevin and Jack were up to  ski the Big.  We signed in at the patrol shack, and waited our turn.  They limit who and when you or your group get to ski either the Big Couloir or the North Snowfields, so groups don't ski on top of each other.  Visibility was poor to start, which probably helped Francine not see how steep is was.  The snow was great, as we were one of the first thru.  We traversed thru to Ripps and Horseshoe Bowl Traverse to Horseshoe Bowl.  Made our way our Lookout Ridge (blue run) to Single Jack a tree run.  Skied all the way to the bottom of the 6 shooter express - 4,000 feet descent.