Wednesday April 3rd Report

[Southside_Bobby]

Concrete before the storm.

ROTD - K1 shlepp was a breeze. Zoom!

The place was a total ghost town, as is often the case anyway pre dump. But today it didn't feel like a perk.

Too windy for K1 to run. Bubble ran well most of the time, though. CQ felt a little less gusty than NRQ.

They ran the S3 briefly without loading, perhaps in case it was needed today. It will likely be a critical lift tomorrow.

Nice seeing/riding Needles4 with Rusty and GIS.

[skiadikt]

9-11 shift. one of my shortest days of the season. "maybe" the skiing improved later but wasn't sticking around to find out.

[RustyK]

Bay one with Southside. No K1 so off to the bubble with the 802.

Headed to needles due to the winf and grit hitting you in the face.

Panic double groomed, so not too bad. Everything else frozen cord.

Dreamaker so loud my ears rang.

Couple more and back to the bus. Everyone quit. Shortest and worst day of the year for me.

Maybe it will snow.

[HomeyTim]

Ski’d bell-to-bell. Morning - Cruise maybe the best snow on the hill - late groom. Panic/Needles/GE/Lower High Road worthy of do-overs. Couldn’t find anything else of that quality although Snowshed Slope not horrible. That kinda day. The single stripe re-groom down Upper Bitter mostly served to create an obstacle course of random ice chunks. Bear Cub not horrible.

Snow started to fall noon-ish and transformed most of the death-luge trails to slightly-less-scary.

Ventured up to North Ridge - yikes - crazy wind. Some snow depositing in the lee of the trees on skiers right. At least one NRQ chair seat lost to the wind… others seemed to be unwrapping and flapping in the breeze. Think they closed CQ early since there were no takers.

Great Northern quite good, all things considered… as was Caper. Timberline had some nice snow deposits as did the other trails @ Ramshead. Snow changed to ice pellets for a while around 2ish. Fog in-and-out.

Back to the bubble around 3:30. Conditions basically frozen corduroy with snow deposits where the wind didnt scour - Mouse Run, Bunny talking about you. Lower Chute some decent snow here and there.

Decided to head back to Bear after seeing an oncoming bubble chair be blown 90 degrees backward near the top of the lift. Hard to make forward motion on High Traverse due to wind… at least there was no snow on it to slow me down!

Bear Trax quite good as were Claw & Upper / Lower Skyeburst to end the day. Of course everything is relative.

Day gets 3 stars - 1 star for conditions, +1 star for meaningful snowfall, and +1 star for surviving the day w/o injuries or breaking equipment. The only other positive for the day was that the snow that fell was pretty dry and there was basically no freezing ra!n and very little melted precipitation. Bodes well for tomorrow.

No need to groom tonight - all the corduroy is still there. Mikaela would love these conditions.

[rogman]

Onto the SPE about 9:30 and immediately noticed the noisy surface. I’d find that to be the case everywhere at Bear. The forecast and the rising wind made me cautious about leaving that side; I didn’t want to end up calling for a ride or taking a bus. I talked to some peeps that came to Bear because an ambassador told them the surface might be better on this side. Nope. After a ride that required sitting in the air for 7 minute lift shut down I bailed. Killington gamely kept the SPE running all day, but obviously at reduced speed. So the skiing was lousy, still a first world problem.

[Captain Hafski]

Afternoon Report. Interesting for sure but felt like we did OK for a coupla old folks. Skied around most of the mountain though did no go higher than Snowdon; didn't want to chance it on North Ridge or Canyon chairs; did anyone mention wind up high yet ?

Predominant surface at Snowdon was frozen roy. Not chatteroy mind you; it was much to frozen for that. Just nice smooth ice with patches of pow to look out for [and to make some turns in]. Homey T hit the nail on the head with "Conditions basically frozen corduroy with snow deposits where the wind didnt scour" !

Up Supe and got a workout trying to get over the back. Back of Supe glacier and Gateway mostly wind scoured iceroy then Stash much better with an inch or so to turn on in most places [that were protected by the wind].

Lower Cruise Control OK with chunky monkey. Note: In general, early groomed trails were the iceroy and later groomed trails were chunky. Panic -> Needle's Eye OK and about the same.

Lower High Road close to ROTD. Mostly out of the wind and an inch or so of freshies on the right side most of the way down.

ROTD: Over the back of Supe Skyewalker -> Bear Trax -> Bear Claw -> Lower Skyeburst. Parts of Bear Trax were scary, most of Bear Claw decent, Viper Pit OK, and Lower Burst decent with some chunks.

WROTD: Bittersweet, especially top section, getting back 'home'.

Felt pretty good about sticking it out for 8 or so runs. Well earned Happy Hour at Lookout completed the day for us !