The Glades - Valentine's Day 2009

More snow and more on the way! Joe, Pierre and I met at the Galena Starbucks at 7 (after I got my traditional bagel and cream cheese from Truckee Bagel). We dropped Pierre's car off at Galena Park (South Entrance) and then drove up the hill. We thought about starting from near Sky Tavern, but weren't sure where we could park without worrying about a ticket, so we went up to Big Springs. There was a LOT more snow than we anticipated, but there was a nice skin track already set, so we just followed it. We soon noticed that it was heading up to Sunshine Knob, not Hourglass as we had intended, but we decided to follow it and then ski down to Galena Creek from there. There were already a few tracks in Dean's Dive and we followed them down and then continued on to the creek. From Galena Creek we took about 30 minutes to work our way over to the ridge to start the climb up the Glades. We reached the top in 1 1/2 hours and were excited to for our run. We weren't disappointed. The skiing was superb! Good enough that we took advantage of our skin track and took a second run. We then traversed along the ridge to the run down to Galena Park, we could just barely make out the track set Thursday by Dick, Eric, Jeff and Hans. There was good snow most of the way down to the flats, but we had to be careful because it was on the rain crust and didn't bond well at all. Plus there are still a lot of obstacles that need more snow to be covered (I snagged a branch). We made it to the car just after 3:30 and rushed up to get Joe's car so he could get home in time to shower and change for the Tahoe Yacht Club Valentine Ball.

I tried something new with the helmet cam: setting it to automatically take a picture every five seconds. I've deleted a lot of the pictures, but here's a slideshow:


These videos may capture some of our fun. I had a problem with the housing, so there's a lot of wind noise (you may want to turn the volume down).