If you’ve followed my Wednesday night updates from West Mountain (OK, it’s been a couple weeks) you’ll know that we’ve had more scratch than soft for surface conditions this winter. But Wednesday night this week finally coincided with one of the few (only?) snowstorms of the winter.
When I left work in Albany late Wednesday afternoon, there were a few inches of wet snow on the ground. The snow continued to come down at a moderate to heavy clip as I pulled into West Mountain’s parking lot an hour later. The 3 to 4 inches of new snow that had fallen at that point certainly improved the trail surfaces, but it was still difficult to avoid bottoming out on the rock-hard underlayer. Eventually the accumulating snow improved the surfaces enough so that the last few runs of the night were noticeably better than the first few.
Skier on the Frolic trail
I felt pretty certain on Wednesday night that the kids would have a snow day on Thursday, so I decided to elect a snow day from work for myself and get some additional mileage out of my West Mountain mid-week pass. I’ve skied so many nights at West over the years that skiing during the day seemed to be almost a novelty. Most of the trails had been at least partially groomed overnight, but a couple inches lay on top of the corduroy. Ungroomed areas were 6 to 8 inches deep. The new snow finally completely buried the hard, scratchy base, giving the entire mountain a very nice and much needed re-surfacing.
A few more inches fell after West groomed Wednesday night
Between 9am and noon I got in a dozen or so runs at West. I had agreed to come home around lunchtime so that we could all go over to Willard Mountain in the afternoon. Our kids are so snow-starved this winter that I couldn’t talk them into going with me in the morning – they just wanted to stay home so they could sled and play in the snow. In fact they were having such a good time doing that that we didn’t leave for Willard until sometime after 3:00, which was fine since Willard runs their lifts until 9pm.
Willard Mountain, Thursday afternoon
Still snowing at Willard
Like West, Willard had around 8 inches of new snow, and the snow continued to come down the entire time we skied. Though Willard is smaller than West (450’ vertical, I think, compared to West’s 1000’), the main face – The Colonel trail – has a nice pitch and the chairlift ride is short, so you can get a lot of skiing in a relatively short time. Because it’s a compact ski area, Beth and I could ski with Sylvie (she rides the chairlift with me) and give Daniel the option of skiing on his own or with school friends. By 6pm the kids were getting tired (no surprise since they had been out in the snow all day), and we headed home not long after the lights came on.
Looking down Willard's Colonel trail - steeper than it looks
Sylvie skiing Willard's Bunny Hop trail
Up north, Gore got a foot of new snow and is 100% open today, Friday. If we can avoid damaging rain Friday night and Saturday, it should be a good weekend all over.
So does that count as 3 ski days?
ReplyDeleteI'll take 3. That puts me at 28 ski days so far this winter. :)
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