My very first ski day of the season

So this was the one, the very first ski day of the season. The attentive reader will notice that on the 3rd I said “first skinning outing of the season", that was not an oversight; the emphasis was definitely on the workout that day... But today I got to ski powder off of the chutelettes of Baldy’s shoulder including some legitimately steep lines (at least for a first of the season...). I was up in the pm and it was dumping good, it was almost a white out (see picture to the left). I did a couple of laps up there and then a ski-out all the way down to the Gold Miner’s parking lot. All of it was nicely skiable. The main caution is higher up on the shoulder where there was a fair amount of rock, you rapidly develop a heightened sensitivity towards really using both skis equally and making yourself as light as ever. The rest, as you ski down, presented no issues at all.
There was maybe half a dozen skiers on skins and lower down a plethora of people with resort skis boot packing up (they stayed mostly pretty low on the mountain).

The cover feels like a solid foot minimum pushing to two and even three feet in the most privileged spots (see the poles in the snow). Kudos to those NOAA wheater reports (see yesterday's post). Great Baldy shute is probably not going to need many more of these storms before it is skiable too. Below you can see a few turns taken off the Baldy shoulder. In this pre-season time of angst and tension, this was clearly a worthwhile outing!