Waist deep powder in Southern Ontario!

In a good year we can expect about 60cm of base at Blue Mountain in Collingwood, Ontario which usually means they can push around enough snow to have a few runs open until Easter or early April (which ever comes first).

After another 30-50cm of fresh snow pummeled southern Ontario this past weekend, we are now up to a remarkable average base of 150cm! This is actually more than double what Tremblant is reporting in Quebec!

Over the last two weekends I’ve been teaching & course conducting a Level 1 CSIA Ski instructor course at Mount St. Louis Moonstone.  This past Sunday was exam day where students were assessed one last time on both their teaching and skiing abilities to see if they had achieved the Level 1 standard.  After a few warm up runs I decided to take the class over to the Moonstone side where we found untracked runs all around us.

Needless to say we extended our warm up a few more runs.

Feeling the tug of responsibility and being mindful of how much time we had to cover off the lessons, I brought the group over to the top of another run where I was planning to introduce an exercise to promote good fore / aft balance before heading to the beginner area to start the lessons.

What we found instead was a mogul run completely buried in snow.

Since the groomers left the moguls runs alone, we found ourselves in powder that was waist deep in some spots and at least knee deep all the way down!

We took three more runs. 

Having this much snow is mostly unheard of in Southern Ontario. I was nearly overwhelmed with flashbacks of Chile, Whistler, and Kicking Horse. It was not just a great start to our day, but an epic one that none of us will soon forget.

The excitement of the morning spilled into the group lessons where all candidates in my cell successfully passed the teaching component of their Level 1 with enthusiastic and skill based lessons… although nobody was brave enough to bring their lesson back into the powder bumps