I am so up on Smuggs. I can’t even say the name without smiling and feeling better. Smuggs is one of only three or four ski areas that I connect with on an emotional level. Perhaps the honeymoon is not over yet. But I don’t think that is the case. Despite only having skied Smuggs four times, the connection already runs deep. It’s a special place.

The expansive tree skiing grabs me like no where else. The types of trees, spacing varieties, topography, and vertical all combine to offer an immensely pleasing experience. Much like other Northern Vermont areas, Smuggs tree skiing is a choose your own adventure and the best adventures are often off map. But by thinking outside the pack, there are so many seemingly obvious shots that remain untracked days after a storm.

Such was the case today. Three days after the storm and I was still scoring six inches of untracked on every run with a few boot deep shots thrown in for good measure. And we are not talking about one or two turns worth of untracked. We are talking full line of sight untracked. Stop, reassess, traverse, and repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

But it is not all untracked fun and games. Smuggs is a mountain that you can work or that can work you. Not many other mountains can lead you into so many committing shots. Eight foot wide chutes are everywhere. And you better get to them before they get side slipped; exposing rock and root. This is not a mountain to blindly follow tracks into the woods without top skills.

The irony is that off map chutes get hammered harder than many on map lines; often times by less than proficient skiers. From the M1 Double, you can clearly see that Liftline is amongst the hardest non-gladed on map trails in the east (I would rank it as the hardest). So skiers easily extrapolate that Black Hole, Smugg’s Triple Diamond (I won’t go there), must be even harder.

And they might be right if it got skied as much as some steeper off map chutes get skied. But I made my first descent of Black Hole today and found powdery steep chute skiing bliss that was almost untouched in many places. Yet off the map, I was forced to side hop and side step down rocks and roots in a tight chute due to the snow being completely slid off. Such is the character of the mountain.

Strictly speaking for the terrain and the skiing, I think I enjoy Smuggs even more than Mad River Glen. Mad River beats on its skiers with top to bottom bumps. Even with the low capacity Single, the mountain gets hammered hard. Much of the tree skiing at Smuggs is bump free excepting the more popular glades such as Doc’s.

I like moguls…. in the Spring. 🙂 I enjoy tree skiing more when it is just the trees and the powder. Smuggs shows that you can have a tough and satisfyingly hard day of skiing by relying on terrain, pitch, and natural features rather than top to bottom bumps. A blow by blow comparison of the two mountains may be written at some point. The two are more similar than dissimilar.