The line-up echoed back across the parking lot as the big pack cheered patrol’s overnight assessment. The crowd was growing quickly, but our eyes kept stealing furtive glances at the soon-to-be skintrack heading away from Alpental.

It was hard to resist the easy temptations of the lifts, especially those we’d tasted the day before. Several consecutive days of deep, dry snowfall across the Northwest certainly meant another bell-to-bell powder day in the steep treed rollovers and granite chokes.

Instead we rode on a hope that one thin, aesthetic line had remained sheltered in the storm, peacefully collecting a winter’s worth of snow. It must have been a roar when the chair opened, but 1500 feet higher and across the valley, silver dollar flakes dampened it to a dull buzz. We climbed in our own world now.

Snow assessments kept checking out, and the skintrack deepened – shin to knee, knee to mid-thigh by the time we hit the ridge. Spotty trees and craggy granite knuckles kept us on edge above the void. A handful of phantom entrances teased at us as we searched for the Slot’s hanging snowfield and the one path that would cleanly cleave the thousand-foot cliff. We caught two exhausted, valiant trailbreakers at the entrance and stood stunned for a minute. Already expecting the best of the year, we still weren’t prepared to find this quiet, this apparent stability, this deep new snow.

The ever-present fog – the Snoqualmie Cloud – oozed through the basin below, swirling up the Slot like heavy smoke on a dewy morning. In a heartbeat, Charlie and Ben dropped out of sight, and when the whooshing stopped, I followed.

One turn, floating lightly down an airy elevator shaft. Two turns, cackling, howling laughter washed over by powder. Three turns, accelerating through four, a speckled granite wall slid close by, my line of sight appearing only fleetingly below. Through brief glimpses, I found my rhythm, established in a delightful vacuum between overhead barrels and the ebb and flow of the fog that held back peripheral movement until my skis finally stopped on the apron.

An hour away in Seattle, a million grumbled about the heavy rain. Somewhere else across the valley, we knew that many others had made beautiful turns. But our un-erasable smiles made it hard not to think that our little group had indeed found something special that day.