Just back from a 3-day visit to Purgatory with the Alpine Ski Club. Pictures in the previous post from Monday's powder day.
Friday AM departure, stoked by the report of 17" of new snow from Thursday's storm, but glad to see a break in the weather for our travel day. Clear and dry roads up to Flag and across the Four Corners. Talking to some folks at dinner, we received reports that the warm nature of the storm left a very wet and heavy snowfall and Friday's conditions were described as difficult. Minimal grooming was encountered.
Wife and I are returning to skiing after a short, 28 year break.
Five days in Utah last February was our "get back in the saddle," and this trip would be our first for this season. We are rusty intermediate skiers, so we picked Purg for this year's first turns, remembering the fun had years ago on the long rolling groomed blue runs on the backside served by lift #3.
Saturday morning with just a little dust, we found no groomers and the lack of some smooth corduroy to get our legs back was a bit disappointing. Wife was struggling so we ended up staying mostly on the front side greens. Weather - overcast with a few flurries.
Sunday was mostly sunny and dry, found some corduroy but it was the exception. A good day of skiing. A morning lesson has me on my way to learning how to actually use my ski edges to turn. My old school parallel style has been rendered mostly extinct with the newer equipment. Didn't take long to get the basic gist, and quickly realized how efficient the carved turns can be and how a lot less energy is used. This will be good!
Monday morning greeted with 4-5" of true light powder. Again, no active grooming was noted but the few that were done Saturday night were delightful. I skied by myself, working my way up and down the backside and was virtually alone on the blues off of chair 8. Everything was cut up by mid-morning but then it began to snow hard. By lunchtime another 4" had fallen starting to fill-in the tracks and just making for a superb last few runs before boarding the bus for the tense trip down the highway. Picked up the weenies that chose to stay back in town and headed off for the long drive back to AZ.
All said, a great time!
You may have noticed, I made mention of the scarce grooming several times. It turns out, I was not the only one wondering. It seemed to be the topic for many in our group as well as in conversation with random chair riders and lunch counter/bar occupants. One local seemed to summarize it by saying "I guess they have decided not to do grooming this year..."
Don't know what to think, but with the bad season last year, maybe they have had to cut back on staff? All facets of the facility seemed understaffed. there were long waits for everything, understandable with the holiday weekend, but factually, it wasn't really all that crowded. Daily grooming reports were just total bullshit. I assume they consider a 3-4 day window ok to designate a run as "groomed." Just wondering if anyone else has noticed this or maybe we hit an unusual weekend? Not complaining but more curious.
Purg is not really a destination resort, more of a four corners locals place and one of my favorite long weekend visits. Had been watching the live mountain cams for the month preceding my trip, and had noted that the place is typically deserted weekdays, and with sparse crowds on the weekends. Truly hoping that this season is a good one for the resort.
We were at Purgatory a few weeks ago right after the last storm. I don't know what their normal level of grooming is, but there seemed to be a good blend of groomed and ungroomed terrain. To be fair, we tend to seek out the powder, bumps and trees, and only use the groomers to get back to the lifts, so are not the best when it comes to grading how good the trails are. I think it is fair to say that as you get further towards lift 8 at Purgatory, the terrain gets less groomer friendly. We had a great three days there with a nice variety of terrain to enjoy. Just saying that the conditions you encountered may have been peculiar to that weekend and not reflective of the season in general.