I headed up to Mt. Waterman, my favorite local SoCal mountain, alone early on Sunday morning. To my amazement, the road up the mountain was icy down low, snow packed up high, but open all the way. The plow drivers waved as I drove on through almost alone on the road. When I arrived at 8:45, the parking lot was almost empty but the lifts were already running.

Being the first open day of the season for Mt. Waterman (snow from Heaven, not from Hoses), it was a bit low tide out on the mountain. Waterman has some incredible terrain features (read big rocks to huck), but on this day they were a bit exposed. However, I quickly found that the coverage was more than adequate due to a good foot of solid wet base snow that was subsequently covered by a foot plus of light, fluffy, Colorado Champange. This was SoCal skiing at it’s absolute best.

This was only my second time at Mt. Waterman, so I didn’t know the mountain too well and stayed mostly on-piste. I ran laps down to empty lift lines and only found out later that the road was supposed to be closed but the county had forgotten to send CHP early to block the road. This resulted in less than 200 of us having the powder day of the decade while the rest of SoCal sat in lines on icy and snowpacked roads hoping they had woken up just a few minutes earlier.