Conditions at Gore today were much improved over last weekend, with snowmaking and grooming crews doing a nice job re-surfacing the open trails and the mountain looking a lot more wintery. The forecasted 1 to 2 inches of snow for today never materialized – instead we had mostly overcast skies with occasional breaks of blue, temps in the 20s, and no wind.
We split our day, spending the morning at the summit and the afternoon on the lower mountain trails. Uncas was in great shape for our warm-up run en route to the Straighbrook quad. Despite getting up top relatively early, we found the steeper pitches of the summit trails pretty well scraped off. There was good snow to be found, but you had to endure a bit of pain at times to get to it. Upper Chati was nice (early) and Lower Darby was fun with chalky snow from recent snowmaking. The lower angle of Headwaters held nice snow too.
The blue cruisers on the lower mountain were still in decent shape by the time we hit them after lunch. Showcase, Sleighride, Sunway and Wild Air were generally packed powder with a firm base underneath. Given the amount of traffic today (being Saturday of MLK weekend) the snow held up really well. Beth thought Showcase had the best snow, Daniel and Sylvie picked Sleighride, and I liked skier’s left the whole way down Wild Air, which goes to show that conditions were pretty consistent on the lower mountain. By 3pm or so things had been skied pretty hard, but I suspect overnight grooming will set things right by morning.
Given the ups and downs of this winter’s weather plus holiday weekend crowds, the mountain skied well today. But at this point in a good season we should see the mountain just about 100% open and Burnt Ridge, the Ski Bowl and Rumor aren’t online yet (Echo at Burnt Ridge is scheduled to open tomorrow), not to mention the glades. Hopefully cold weather this week will enable the snowmaking crews to get back in the terrain expansion business.
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