[Bootpathguy]

Wife and I purposely got a late afternoon start. Parking lot full when we arrived Road to Amabilis not groomed. Couple weeks back it was groomed to the summit. I don't know the capabilities of the grooming vehicles, but I imagine the crust in combination with the several feet of powder underneath the crust would be a frustrating task to compact and groom. 2 inch rain crust semi-supportive in the lower section. Extremely supportive at the top. Break through into many feet of powder. It's a long roundtrip snowshoe if you decide to stick with the standard / popular snowshoe route. 12.4 miles. I did a different route to the summit a couple weeks ago in 9.7 miles It was a gorgeous sunny Sunday and parking lot was completely full. We were expecting alot of XC ski traffic & snowshoe traffic. Got to the area where the road turns uphill to Amabilis and found it ungroomed. Still plenty of evidence of lots of traffic. A established snowshoe trench and a hit & miss skate lane. With the late afternoon start and undesirable XC ski conditions, we only encountered 5 people. It was pleasantly warm in direct sunshine. Shedding layers down to a single long sleeve T. Trees all dripping with final remnants of melting snow. In clear weather, late afternoon and golden hour are truly magical anytime of year, and especially in wintertime. We snowshoed the majority of the return trip in the dark. Periodically turning off our headlamps to enjoy the brilliantly bright stars Strange to return to a parking lot, that was completely full just a few hours earlier and find that you are the only remaining vehicle.

[puzzlr]

Beautiful sunset shots

[Nancyann]

Gorgeous photos, bootpathguy! You took full advantage of the lovely late afternoon light. My favorite time of the day too.

[Just_Some_Hiker]

Cool pics.

[Tortoise]

I think the groomer had his hands full grooming the lower trails. There was a race there on Sunday. In general I suspect Amabalis gets a lot less grooming than the rest of the system. There was a time not that long ago that they never groomed it at all. In the beginning of the season this year when some of the other trails didn't have enough snow I think he had time to do Amabalis. Not sure now. I remember him telling me he 'didn't want to run out of money' as I gather there is a fixed budget for grooming (which comes from that snow park pass we all have to buy). You can get a grooming report at http://www.kongsbergers.org/GroomingReport.html which is a really big improvement from yesteryear. Helps you decide which equipment you'll want to bring! Nice pictures. I like the one with the headlamp

[rossb]

@Tortoise -- I think you are right about the grooming recently. Because of the race, and because of the heavy snow (followed by rain, etc.) the groomer couldn't spend much time on Amabalis (or any of the side paths). But the new groomer guy is different than the old guy. Back in the day, he would rarely, if ever, groom all the way to the top. The new guy is much better. It is rare, really, for it to be difficult to get up there, even on a weekday. I ran across that problem recently, but given the race and the huge amounts of snow (several new feet) I can understand why it took a while to groom. It was groomed yesterday, though -- all the way to the top.

[DIYSteve]