As we drove up the road to Crystal Mountain it looked as if spring had a firm grasp on the area. The sun was shining in between eerie low hanging clouds and the snow down near the lodge was slush galore. In its typical unpredictable fashion, the weather in the northwest would soon change all of this.

No sooner did we check into our slope side rooms at the Alpine Inn, did the clouds shut out the sun and the snow began to fall. We awoke in the morning to find about six inches piled on our trusty VW Touareg and snow still falling from above. Winds up top shut down the top lifts and everyone piled in to the Bullwheel to warm up and have some food and drinks. Never ones to miss opportunity, the PTTP Tour boys rolled in to the bar and started our party a bit early.

The crowd was psyched to watch the POWDER Video Awards as the storm raged on outside. Everyone enjoyed a few Redhooks and the primo ski footage for about an hour. Following the show we raffled off tons of schwag from our generous sponsors The North Face, Smith Optics, Salomon North America, and Redhook Breweries. After stoking out the mid-week Crystal Crowd and collecting some bills for local charity, like magic the storm subsided a bit and the patrol gave a green light for the upper lifts.

The following day, after even more snow had fallen, legendary local Wayne Gravey led us around the mountain. You can find a picture of Wayne on the front of the Crystal brochure as he's performing a classic poach on the Warren Miller film crew standing atop Silver King. The King had been closed for a week for the crew and, never one to take any crap from anyone, Wayne dropped in on the King first and bagged one of the best powder lines in the northwest.

Despite marginal conditions at Crystal leading up to our tour stop, we found some great skiing in the newly fallen flakes. Campbell Basin provides epic turns as always and we found some killer tree runs below Rainer Express. Gabe even managed to find himself a little inbounds avalanche that took him for a bit of a ride. He was fine, and bit startled.

Leaving Crystal was difficult first because the snow was falling and the skiing was fantastic and second because we were hitting the road for our final tour stop. The PTTP Tour was headed to Squaw Valley, the undisputed King of Spring. We hoped it still had a bit of winter left in it.