Leap year is serving up its bonus day today.  Known as leap day, Feb. 29 is an added day that seems to magically show up on the calendar at four-year intervals.

Like that “extra” hour in the fall, when clocks are turned back at the end of daylight saving time, this extraneous day begs for some special attention. It cries out for something to make it more worthwhile than those other 365 days we get every year.

So how did you spend your leap year bonus day? We spent ours enveloped in a soft blanket of 8″ of fresh powder.

The best part? It was dumping at a rate of more than an inch an hour this morning. We could barely see 50 yards — and then — right when the lifts opened…

Nothing but high clouds and DEEP powder.

It was hard to find a bad turn this morning. The top 30 yards of our front-side slopes had been a little bit wind-packed, but that didn’t prevent our skis from floating atop the soft snow. Turn by turn, as we descended in elevation, the snow got even better, even deeper.

Knee-deep and waist-deep snow fields were plentiful.

And even ‘groomed’ runs were producing deep powder on the backside.

(I actually got multiple face shots on Dropline today, after it looked like it had been ‘all tracked out’.)

Runs groomed this morning were soft and powdery.

I did find a few patches of corduroy that had been smoothed into the snow surface right before the end of the storm.

But honestly, the powder off-trail was too much of a temptation to try more than a couple turns on the smooth stuff.

Each visitor found a favorite line today, whether out in the open or deep in the trees. But there was one common thread among today’s visitors; everyone agreed it was a worthwhile way to spend our leap year ‘Bonus Day’.

– April