Gore Mountain: 02/02/2012

I don't often get to ski mid-week, but I had the opportunity to connect with a group of friends to ski at Gore Mountain today. When you ski almost exclusively on the weekends, it's easy to forget how nice it is to have the mountain almost entirely to yourself on a weekday. And since the guys I was with are strong, enthusiastic skiers, we packed a lot of skiing into the day.

Echo, top choice for grooming today

I'm getting tired of writing "recent thaw" in seemingly every trip report this winter, but that's just the kind of winter we've been having. Luckily we've also had quick recoveries, thanks to snowmaking and grooming efforts at the mountain. With temperatures well into the 40s on Wednesday, we expected very firm and fast conditions today, but grooming made all the difference and we instead found edge-to-edge, top-to-bottom corduroy that skied very nicely all day.

Thanks to grooming Lies stayed in nice condition today

Echo was a favorite trail today as was Lies, but there wasn't a bad trail on the mountain. I wouldn't expect today's conditions to hold up all day under weekend skier traffic, but additional grooming and snowmaking over the next 24-48 hours should have the mountain in decent shape for the weekend. Snow guns were staged at the summit, and word on the hill is that they will go into action tonight, first on Lies and then elsewhere on the summit. Lies and the other summit trails could be the place to be on Saturday.

Uncas and a semi-clouded summit

It's really too bad that I've got to work tomorrow. A guy could get pretty used to this mid-week skiing thing...