Buller Snow Report & Pics – Weekend 28-29/8/10

Thursday and Friday were not particularly pleasant days to be spending in Melbourne.

One of the conditions I imposed on myself when I decided to settle in the city was to have no regrets, and that the change in life I had chosen would fund some pretty serious adventures, so I shouldn’t get upset when it was pumping at Buller. It started off pretty well, 2008 I was particularly lucky that the timing of the storms meant that the weekends had the best skiing of the season, so I missed out on very little, 2009 never really happened so no harm done there, and so far in 2010 it had been pretty run of the mill.

Last weekend we had a fantastic time skiing a lot of runs that opened for the first time all season, and we left excited at the prospect of a pretty decent storm mid-week. I’ve trained myself through decades of disappointment not to count on weather systems delivering, the best snow forecast is looking out the window in the morning. But this one got its act together and seriously delivered. By Wednesday afternoon reports were coming in that something serious was occurring – backed up with the imagery of the Mountainwatch LBS Cam, Thursday morning was reported by many as a day to remember and it even kept going for Friday. The time lapse function on the Buller Village Square Cam was superb, you could literally see the snow piling up in front of your eyes. Superlatives were being thrown down left, right and centre, and it was only the cooler heads of 20+ season veterans that were not giving this storm ‘best ever’ billing. Semantics aside, it snowed a lot and everyone was loving it.

So I sat at my desk, gritted my teeth, remembered the fun times I had in my 10 years living on the mountain, and more recently thought of the amazing skiing I’d had this year. 2010 has been an absolute standout for me on skis, clearly my best year ever. But there’s something about tearing up your home mountain – all that accumulated local knowledge ensures that you will be the first one to your favourite spots, while the masses poke around the main drags.

Finally the weekend came – we raced up on Friday night, caught up with friends for dinner and hatched a plan for the morning. I accepted a particularly gracious invitation from the Mt Buller Ski Patrol to accompany them opening the mountain. We met up at 7:30am on Saturday for the briefing and headed out on the hill from there. Powder Keg was the warmup, but from the Wombat chair it was clear that we needed to go to the top, and go for a bit of a walk – for all the snow during the week the visibility had been poor, and the upper slopes remained unmolested.

Regrettably one person had beaten us to the Summit Hut, fortunately that person decided to go straight down the main face, leaving us our choice of lines. A quick hello to a friend that was trailing us on the hike, and it was first tracks down Chute 1. We followed that up with first tracks down Chute 2 which is an absolute treat, at the bottom of which I got a call from my brother. He met us on our third hike of the day, as he wasn’t particularly warmed up we did Chute 1 again. Regrettably we have few photos of the morning, but this was not the time for standing around for happy snaps. Here’s Nicole in the crux of Chute 2:

It’s at this point that my position becomes compromised. I do like sharing my adventures on this blog, but I’m particularly guarded about my hard-earned Buller secrets. In years with lots of snow lines open up that aren’t usually contemplated, but on mornings like Saturday I’m able to take full advantage of them. It’s taken me a long time to figure all this out, and I’m not about to hand it out on a platter! So you’ll just need to be comfortable in the knowledge that we ripped the crap out of all my favourite lines, and then collapsed into Koflers for a hard-earned Lasagna. 7 hikes to the summit hut, and 4 back up from well below the rope line – we were stuffed. As the day wore on a layer of cloud enveloped the Summit denying any further access into the Chutes. You don’t decide when you will ski the chutes, they decide when they will let you in.

We made it out for a few more fun laps in Federation and then the legs gave out, so we did a couple of runs with our niece and nephew – our 2yo niece Catherine skied Family Run all on her own, and then it was time to head home. Exhausted but content it was an early night and ready for another day.

The cloud and warm temperatures from Saturday softened the snow, which duly hardened overnight and meant things were firm on Sunday. The party was over in terms of the recent snowfall, and it was back to using your local knowledge to find the soft snow AND avoid the queues – there were an estimated 9500 people on the mountain on Sunday, the queue from the toll gate snaked back to Changue Road, and Mansfield locals could not back out of their driveways due to the constant stream of traffic. However we never waited in a queue longer than 5 minutes, apart from one planned trip to the bottom of Tirol. Best runs were Sun Valley and Bloody Hell as they have an Easterly aspect which catches the morning sun, also McLaughlin’s Shoulder, and the Village Runs late on Sunday were fantastic. For the first time this season I took my DSLR out and got some good shots:

I was terrified to see two punters skiing Chute 2 in tandem on Sunday morning – breaking all the rules in the book. The snow was rock hard, and they were skiing it at the same time. Rule #1 – Chute 2 in firm snow becomes a ‘you fall, you die’ proposition. Secondly, don’t enter it until you see your partner ski out – it’s particularly bad form to fall in a chute and take out the person below. When I was skiing it on Saturday morning a group of riders were approaching it, and Nicole was preparing to politely ask them to leave it until they saw us skiing safely away, but fortunately they headed elsewhere.

I’m particularly reluctant to talk about the Chutes online as they are such a dangerous place in the wrong conditions, I would hate to feel responsible for someone hurting themselves.