A quick report from skiing Gore on Saturday. The bad news first: rain on Christmas eve and warm temperatures since then have hammered our snow pack. Cold temperatures will return for the coming week, but the chances for significant snow in that timeframe are slim. The good news: trails with snowmaking have retained a decent base. There's a significant amount of terrain available (Gore's trail count is around three dozen). There are some thin spots here and there, but for the most part the coverage is excellent. And if you skied in the past few days, you enjoyed soft spring-like snow and temperatures that were more like late March than late December.
Despite the poor weather over Christmas, we were pleasantly surprised with conditions on Saturday at Gore. Relatively mild overnight temperatures prevented the ski surfaces from setting up hard. Everything from the top of the gondola down stayed soft and spring-like all day, even soft enough for bumps to build in places. Uncas, Headwaters, Sleeping Bear, Showcase and Sleighride were all favorites for our group of about 10 family members and friends. Some popular trails like Showcase were a bit crowded at times, while others like Sleeping Bear that are a bit off the beaten track were deserted. Considering the inch and a half of rain that fell, the mountain is in surprisingly good shape.
Although snowmaking was in progress on Chatiemac, the guns were shut down by mid-afternoon due to marginal temperatures. Beginning Sunday night, we should see a nice stretch of cold weather that should allow the snowmaking crews to get back to business in a serious way. I would expect to see the crews at work patching and re-surfacing the bread-and-butter trails before any real terrain expansion gets underway. It's still early in the season, so hopefully we've gotten our January thaw out of the way a little early.
No comments:
Post a Comment