Damn that's nice... what range are you in? How many vertical feet, etc..?

Do you have any pics?

At ten local time, we're flying to Trabzon. From there we will be going tp a place called Zigana Pass. Zigana is about 50km due south from Trabzon. We'll be at our hotel at about 1 am.

Zigana pass is in the Kackar mountains of Turkey, along the black sea heading towards Iran. They're also called the Pontic Crest. The Zigana massif's summit is about 8300 feet, and its skiable down to 4000. So, about 4300 vertical feet. Maybe a bit more. At 4000 feet, they have over a meter of snow on the ground, with the aforementioned snowfall in the past few days. The snow in this range tends to be somewhere between sierra concrete and utah fluff.

Usually, we've been skiing the BC at a place called Uludag. We've been averaging 15cm fresh a week, and since we are the only people who ski powder, its sorta all ours. We're encouraging and teaching the local kids that powder rules, but they're a bit slow on the uptake.

I have tons of pictures, and will have a lot more, but we need to get our website up when we get back from this trip to show them off...its www.outdoorturkey.com , but there aint nothing there right now. I have to get the basic text written this week and then we'll put up the site nice and professional like.

i put up a picture at www.fotolog.net/gcfw
the chutes in this picture are too unstable to ski so far, but we've been hitting other places with similar terrain but without the sun. On the left side of the picture you can see a pretty decent sized sluff. The chute from the left side of the top down around, left of the sluff as you'd ride and on down is about 2200 vertical feet.

more in a week and a half.

Alright... who can help me find part-time work in Turkey?????

you can always find work teaching english if you have a teaching english thingy.

stuck in the airport waiting for the plane. Luckily, economy was full so we had to fly business class and thereby wait in the lounge. Its only about $40 difference, so...

Well, our trip was a total failure. There was a hot wind, locally called a lodos wind and roughly analogous to a chinook, which melted all the unconsolidated snow off the mountains. We watched it go from about a meter of fluff to mud and grass in one day. The pits we dug were all zeros. We only rode around our hotel.

i'll have pictures up of the mountain early next week. If it was developed, it would be one of the worlds best ski areas when there wasn't this god damned wind. (in the ten years i've been in and out of turkey, i've seen this wind twice. its pretty rare.) Plus, if the slopes had been groomed, ridden or otherwise consolidated, the snow would still be there...