Gore Mountain: 03/27/2010

It was firm and fast today. But strong sun, grooming and light skier traffic made the ski surfaces reasonably good. Pulling in at 9 am this morning temps were in the low 20s -- cold, but hardly brutal. We did our mandatory Wild Air warm up run and headed up top.


We skied most of the open summit trails, including Hawkeye and Chatiemac, Open Pit, Cloud and Upper Stielhang, Lower Darby. Took a run down Topridge as well. While surfaces on the upper mountain certainly never corned up, there was just enough softening and loose granular from grooming that everything was edgeable, even good in places.


Coverage seems to be holding up well on the upper mountain, with just a few thin and bare spots opening up. Rumor never opened, but coverage from the headwall down looked very good. To my eye, coverage on all the upper mountain trails seemed sufficient for the two more weekends of skiing that is expected.

The views were spectacular today, with outstanding visibility north towards the High Peaks and east to Vermont.

Daniel was disappointed that the glades were closed. Me too. We decided to investigate a few favorite tree shots anyway, to assure ourselves that we weren't missing anything, and so that we could report back.

Since I'm not the guy who'll ski anything and say it's good, I'll tell you ... it was bad. There is a decent amount of base, but it was rock-solid and basically unskiable.


Daniel declared it "awesome, great!" We made sure to sample more than one location, for a complete report.


Near the end of the day, we headed down from the upper mountain. Daniel did laps on Wild Air while I tried Showcase, Sleighride and Sunway. Due to the lower elevation, these trails had softened quite a bit more than the upper mountain.

With the exception of the bottom third of Showcase, which had been patched together by the grooming crew, coverage was fine and these trails skied quite well. Lower Sleighride in particular was in excellent shape and skied nicely.


It seems that we have alternated between soft spring conditions and firm and fast for the past 4 weekends. Hopefully that trend will continue and deliver us some warm temps and soft snow for next weekend.