December 26 - Dakota Bowl Opens

The day after Christmas was a beautiful bluebird day. Jim, Trevor, Colin and I decided to head for the summit and meander over to the Dakota chairlift via Liberty Bowl. Today was the first day of the ski season that Dakota would be open and well, I guess we were curious and hopeful that there might be some powder there even though the rest of the mountain was well skied packed powder.

Morning ride on the Lone Peak Triple. Still just love the views here and the overall feeling of this part of the mountain. It's not a long lift but it is a fixed grip lift and that makes for a perfect ride enjoy the views and scope the terrain for hidden powder stashes.

We had a relatively short wait for the tram. There's nothing like being whizzed up 1,500 vertical feet in 4 minutes! In this photo, you can see the other tram coming down as we head up. Skiers' eyes are inevitably drawn toward Big Couloir, the steep gash to the right of the summit. Skiing this run still remains my greatest skiing accomplishment but Jim and I need to do it again with better visibility. But not today. They need quite a bit more snow to get it open this season.

After skiing down Liberty Bowl from the summit, the four of us headed further south/southwest to the Dakota area. Our first run down a trail here was alluring but dangerous. They had not had enough snow to really cover the rocks and tree trunks and we all floundered a bit to get down safely. Our skis paid the price with some nice gauges. UGH.

But, we decided to give Dakota Bowl a try. This is a gorgeous bowl with outstanding towering cliffs above and we were hopeful that the surface here would be smoother than our previous tree run. Boy were we in luck!! We were the first paying guests to ski the bowl for the '09/'10 ski season!! There were two or three tracks from ski patrol along the far reaches of the bowl but the fall line part of the bowl was unskied and waiting. We were nervous about hitting rocks but much to our amazement we skied this whole run mostly unscathed. The powder was thick and buttery, not deep, but quite nice. Here are Colin's first tracks:

Colin submitted this photo to Big Sky and it became the "Photo of the Day" for the Big Sky website!! Very cool. It's not a great photo but oh well. Skiers love the thrill of being the first people to ski a powder run and there were very few people here. We almost had this to ourselves for 3 or 4 runs. What a great surprise for a day when the rest of the mountain was well trodden. We celebrated our morning with a great lunch at the new Shedhorn Grill (a yurt near the Shedhorn lift).