Jim Schley

Saturday was a beautiful bluebird day on the mountain, but it was VERY cold with temps in the single digits and some wind. Snow conditions were nice despite a lack of fresh snow. North Lynx skied nicely, and the Orchard woods were decent. We dropped into our first run in Slide Brook for the season, and had a great run. There were a lot of tracks, and the traverse was thin, but the skiing was great with some fresh tracks to be found here and there. Higher on the mountain, where fresh snow was found, you would see about five inches of fluffy powder on top of a very fragile crust with another six inches of powder below. After returning from Slide Brook we endured one of the coldest rides up Heaven’s Gate that I can remember. Cold! It was worth it, though, as the woods off the upper mountain were really in great shape with very few tracks.

Sunday was cold too, but not quite as bad, and the first part of the day was pretty much a replay of Saturday with more great runs off North Lynx followed by Slidebrook. We took a different path through Slidebrook and found even better snow and lots of fun things to jump off of. It was great. We followed with another woods run off the upper mountain that was every bit as awesome as Saturday. The route through the woods down to the bottom of Heaven’s Gate was pretty fun too.

Things went somewhat awry after this when Jim and I decided to revisit the super secret stash that we found back in March of 2008. We didn’t find it. Not sure what happened to it. Instead, we had over an hour of bushwhacking slog through very dense spruce. It was tough but we eventually emerged from the woods, and we definitely know where the stash is NOT. We did manage to get a couple good turns in there, and where we could actually ski, the snow was pretty sick. 111/111 trails open at Sugarbush. only 76 inches of snow so far this season.