grooming 1-3&4

The rain on friday turned to snow by 1:00. about 3 inches accumulated but promptly started blowing all over the place. the temprature drop was quite sudden and the rain that was falling froze quickly and powery snow accumulated on top. This prevented the snow layers from bonding together and has presented a grooming challenge. the top layer tends to slide around on the ice below and make mounds and trenches in random places. the new snow was also not enough to press track into and the ice below was too hard without tilling up the ice, a long tedious and often unsuccessful process. Sometimes when you break through the ice it all goes terribly wrong. exhibit A was at teh lower canyon/fox tail intersection. big crater.
Add to this the fact that I was trying to widen the trails for the potato cup and the friday night grooming was slightly messed up. it was OK but should have been awesome. the easiest grooming is typically 2 inches of fresh on a good base with tempratures in the 15-25 degree range.

Last night I tried to fix some of the ruts on the race course skate lanes by tilling the entire course twice before smoothing it all out and hoping it would re-set by morning. well- it was below zero and the snow would re-set almost immediately so I had to break the course into small sections and till and groom anout 1k at a time. this is less than ideal ebcause any time to stop and start a nice ridge/jump appears. At this point the best thing is to hope for some snow on monday and avoid making things worse tonight. the creekside area is still a bit thin for th PB to set track ad the ginzu can't do it without making about 20 passes to soften things up first. maybe Monday.