West Ymir Bowl

My friend Jen and I headed up to the hill today with plans of skiing off of Ymir Peak. It snowed a tiny bit last night, 2 inches, but any snow was better than no snow after a week and a half of dry, spring like conditions. Fortunately the wind had picked up a bit and moved the snow around making it more like 4 inches on the north facing aspects. We couldn't see Ymir Peak when we got to the parking lot, but we could see some patches of blue sky and thought that it might break later on. So we headed up. When we got to the saddle between Prospector Peak and Ymir, we made the decision to drop into west Ymir bowl since the visibility was poo up on the peak. Two guys had hit West Ymir a few minutes before us, so other than those two lines, a blank canvas of snow was all ours. We had a nice 1600 foot run down the main bowl and back to the ski hill. It wasn't deep, but it was great to be back on some semblance of powder again. After a bite to eat we thought we'd take another lap, this time heading out a little farther into the bowl and skiing a steeper variation. This second run was fantastic with great, wide open turns down the middle of the bowl. We heard from some guys that we ran into that Five Mile basin had deeper snow so we ran over for a quick lap down the steep trees and into the bottom of the main bowl. The run was fantastic coldsmoke powder, 6 inches deep. Definitely the best snow of the day and the last week and a half.

View from the top of our first run

Jen in the lower half of the bowl

The view from our second lap

Joshua mid turn on the second run