McCauley Mtn - 1/14/11

Went up to McCauley Mountain for their "Crazy Friday" $12 lift ticket special with my brother and my cousin.  Based on their ski reports through the week, McCauley got about 9" of snow during the week.

We were on the lift as soon as it opened and started out with a warm up run down Skyride, then headed off for the ungroomed trails.  Did a run down Lower God's Land and found lots of fresh powder there, then went to Olympic.  Olympic had great coverage and rather fresh whales on it, but it was some interesting skiing in the morning with several spots of loose chunks of man made snow.  Ran into a ski patroller mid way down that said he was hoping a lot of people would go down it and pack things down a bit.

Next run was down Sidewinder on nice soft corduroy, then we headed for Lost Trail which had plenty of fresh powder for what was my first tree run of the season.  Next was Decamp with more powder, although there were already some bare spots since it's steep with no snowmaking.

We spent the majority of the day lapping Lower God's, Lost Trail, Olympic, and Decamp with runs down Skyride and Sidewinder when our legs needed something resembling a break.  Decamp was easily my pick of the morning, but by the end of the day it had gotten very scraped off.  Lower God's and Lost Trail were still skiing very well by the end of the day and still had good coverage, Sidewinder and Skyride stayed great all day.  The ski patroller from the morning got his wish, Olympic got more packed down as the day went on and nice bumps were starting to form by the afternoon, which made it my afternoon pick.

We were there until the end of the day and had a blast the entire time.  The only thing that surprised me was that Helmer's wasn't open yet, but hopefully they'll make snow on it soon!  Even without Helmer's and a couple other trails it was one of my top McCauley days.  :)

Rosie - welcome, and thanks for the report.

 Seems like on the website they show a lot of bumped up terrain. Do they leave significant amounts of McCauley ungroomed?

Quite a bit stays ungroomed.  The 2 glades (Lost Trail and Barkeater) obviously don't get groomed, and I've never seen Lower God's, Big Dipper, Helmer's, Olympic, and Decamp groomed.  There were bumps on the side of Skyride as well on Friday.

A big part of the reason I love McCauley is all their bump trails, some of them are good practice for Gore!  Next time I'll have to remember the camera.

AC was at McCauley yesterday. He said they got 15" of snow. We were going to go up to Snow Ridge, but I had things going on at home, so AC went up to McCauley instead. Why he didn't go to Snow Ridge, I don't know. I am hoping to see a report from Skimore soon. They got 20" of snow up there.