Summer riding ta Timberline is awesome. This year it is going to be epic. If you check this thread:
http://www.snowboardingforum.com/sno...er-day-mt.html This was this Wedensday and they got another 10 inches after that. Utah is awesome to be sure, but Mt. Hood has the longest season of anywhere and the Cascade volcanoes and the Washington Olympics have great hikable backcountry to ride all summer long. Mt. Hood Meadows where I work is almost always up and running by Thanksgiving and always runs well into May. We could be operating right now with over 170 inches still on the ground but people tend to quit coming by mid May so they shut down. There is no profit turning empty chairs and burning $5.00 per gallon diesel in Grooming cats just to get 50 people showing up the next day. I hate it, but I understand Meadow`s decission.
Here is the Palmer chair in late August. The Palmer snowfield up top is about a half mile long and about that wide. The gulleys below take you all the way to the bottom of Palmer and are actually a lot of fun to ride. They set up a nice terrain park in one of the deeper ones. I can`t find my pics of that from last summer however.
By the end of summer, you download Magic Mile back to the lodge.
There is one gulley full of snow that you can ride almost all of the way, but this was a bad snow year. This year, I predict there will be good, rideable snow all the way to the lodge well into August.
Evening shot of Palmer and the hikable terrain above in August
