Wish I could say that we left some freshies for those not willing to brave the cold and wind on Saturday. Unfortunately for the fair weather skiers, you snooze you loose. Jay is officially tracked out. After a horrendous beginning of the season, it is officially on at Jay Peak with 70 out of 76 trails open following a one foot dump of blower powder. The best snow conditions of the season to date was quickly ravished by the hungry powder hounds leaving nothing but tracks in their wake.
Dan and Austin joined me for First Chair on The Jet Triple Chairlift. Dan made the brilliant suggestion to delay the glades a run and sample the powder on the open slopes. We enjoyed a crazy cool run down Haynes featuring about six inches of blower powder over a groomer surface. The skiing felt REALLY nice. I was carving turns slightly on the groomed hard pack in between floating mid-turn on the powder. White Gold was bellowing up from my tips and floating over my knee caps in a rush on white. It was a really sweet run and great start to the day.
Into Timbuktu we went for for run number two which was excellent boot deep powder on a generally solid base. Next we decided to sample Kitz Woods which was amazingly quite tracked out already!? After more powder in Timbuktu, we tried Canyonland which was thoroughly tracked out. Below Canyonland, we found that the Bonaventure glades were really sweet despite not much untracked left. The powder went really quick considering the blue and red chairs were nearly ski on all morning.
At this point, we noticed why the lines were short: the damn Tram was spinning!! Our plans for the morning were made with the assumption that both the Tram and Freezer would be on wind hold. Just as the Tram went down due to wind, we took the Red Chair up and hiked over the ridge to try Beaver Pond. We found Beyond generally tracked out. After the run out, we found that a horrid line for the metro quad had developed due to the Tram skiers heading back stateside.
The wind and cold were getting progressively worse all day and seriously sucked by noon time. We decided to warm up in the Stateside Lodge for a few minutes and then took two more runs. After which Dan decided to pack it up. Austin and I went inside the Stateside Lodge to warm up again and took a few more laps on the Blue Chair. We dug furiously for powder into the lesser known spots on Stateside and generally found things well tracked out with occasional untracked powder shots.
Going into today, I believed that the forecasts were over hyped again. I am glad I took this perspective. Every storm this season has tended to fall some what short of expectations and this storm is no different. Lots of boot deep with occasional knee deep drifts in places was really sweet. But it went quickly and fell short of upper projections. Everything on the map was tracked out by noon time. As for what was off the map? Slim pickings with many shots still not ready for prime time (we had two too many snow snakes rip skis off today, not harm no fowl, but not encouraging us to push the boundary to boundary open woods policy). So the summary is today was a great powder day, tomorrow should be a really good packed powder day. The woods have lots of thin spots and lots of thin cover, we still need another big dump or three before things start seriously going off.