Jim Schley

I have no pictures to post along with this entry! I wanted to take some, but it was too cold for camera to work all weekend!

It’s not that often that I get to ski on a non-holiday weekday, and I was more than psyched to hit the mountain with Murph on Friday with what promised to be a very quiet day there. There’s nothing like having the mountain to yourself. We took off as early as we could muster and made it onto the lift by late morning. It was super cold but sunny and bluebird skies. I’m not sure the temps got above zero at the top. Five or six inches of fresh, light snow sat on the consolidated packed powder base at high elevations. Lower on the mountain it was variable as it appears that some warmer temps and possibly unfrozen precipitation crusted the snow and making it slick in other places after the temps dropped.  Where it was good, it was really good, and there was plenty of untracked snow to ski on Friday. The packed powder base underneath was deep enough to cover most rocks. We started skiing off Heaven’s Gate, and Spillsville was decent. Ripcord was ok, but not great as it seemed as though the base was pretty slick and the new snow had mostly been blown off. We moved over to Castlerock and found the real goods. Three consecutive runs on Liftline later, we were happy campers. There were a lot of rocks lurking around, but there was also a lot of soft snow to ski in. John Egan was also out skiing Liftline, and when we spoke with him afterwards, he said that it was the best trail on the mountain right now and that it had benefited from a lot of snow being windloaded onto it. He was definitely having as much fun as we were as we watched him ski under us as we rode the lift. Saturday was another good day with more cold temps and sunshine. As the weekend crowds descended, all of the soft snow got consolidated and packed down, but conditions stayed pretty good. We did more great skiing on Castlerock as well as a maiden voyage on some groomed manmade snow off of Gatehouse. Saturday was Demo Day, and I tried out a bunch of skis with the K2 Sidestash coming away as the hands-down winner. Demoing skis on Castlerock required extreme care as I really did not want to bring any of them back to the reps with damage. I think I was mostly successful, although as the day went on and the trails got skied, the cover did get thinner making the rocks all the more exposed. Sunday was cold again but with a biting wind that made it less pleasant. Skiing remained fun on that packed powder with runs on Paradise and Liftline. Liftline was significantly bonier than it was on Friday causing some friends who saw us from the lift question our judgement. They couldn’t deny that we looked pretty good skiing it, though! Of course Vermont didn’t get any of the megalopolis blizzard that hammered Massachusetts and the rest of the East Coast. The 10″ we got at home in Stow skied pretty nicely on XC gear on Tuesday, though. Nordic skiing is fun too. 105/111 trails open at Sugarbush. 41 inches of snow so far this season.