Category: Cannon Mountain

2019-2020 Season, Cannon Mountain, January, Powder Day

2019 Retrospective

Cannonball

Ski Days & Blog Posts

During the first half of 2019, I gave up blogging. It wasn’t a deliberate choice per se, but the omission of an act is functionally the same as making a definitive decision. I ended the 2018 season with a write up about the State of TheSnowWay. That post might as well have been called “The State of my Life: Externalizing.”

TSW went radio silent from January-July of 2019. My first post of this year was in August, an externalized photography postmortem called Ubiquity & Bewilderment. The post ends “I’ve never posted less during a single season. Yet, I’ve never had more to say.” I knew something had gone horribly wrong. The thread was there. I just needed to summon the will to pull it.

In the State of TheSnowWay, I wrote that “Part of writing a blog is process. I love process. But I am no longer inspired by the blogging process.” By November 2019, I found my love of process again. Writing reinforces identity. What did my lack of blogging say about my identity? I wrote about recasting my tale in Narrative, the first TSW “trip report” written before the trip. Since then, every ski day of the current season has been accompanied by a blog post.

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2019-2020 Season, Cannon Mountain, December

So Bad It’s Good

Upper Ravine

Hysterical laughter and a huge grin — an odd reaction to the lunar landscape. Someone listening nearby might think I had gone mad. But there was nobody on the nearby trails. Despite the holiday weekend, only a few regulars lined up for the 8:15am first tracks tram. I had Upper Ravine all to myself; and I was loving it.

The skiing was like watching a really bad movie: the more cringe worthy the conditions, the funnier it was. I was unironically enjoying objectively awful conditions. I kept thinking “one more run and then pack it in”. But I kept finding the desire for yet another heinous lap.

Had I experienced these conditions last year, I would have been rather salty. Actually, I wouldn’t have even gone to the mountain despite having a season pass and nothing better to do. But instead, I found a way to enjoy myself despite experiencing one of the worst days of the season.

That said, I lasted less than two hours and I did not go back on Sunday. I may be feeling more like my old self again, but I am not a masochist.

2019-2020 Season, Cannon Mountain, December

Day Eight

Eight ski days in less than four weeks. That is almost half as many days as some of my recent season totals.

I had every excuse not to head up to Cannon today. The day started with temperatures barely in double digits paired with a stiff breeze. Without any new snow during the past few days, conditions would likely be firm and fast. Natural snow trails would almost certainly be lack luster.

In fact, natural snow trails were worse than lack luster. High winds and Saturday skier traffic had decimated most of the natural snow trails. Many trails were brutal hard pack “one and done’s”. But Vista Way skied nicely. And a it felt great to rail some arcs down Taft, Tramway, and Middle Cannon.

It was a good day. Even if conditions were lack luster, it was not a lack luster day of skiing.

2019-2020 Season, Cannon Mountain, November

Quantity Over Quality

Zoomer Lift Line
Zoomer Lift Line

During the past dozen years, I’ve become rather selective about ski days. Quality over quantity was an absolute, a guiding principle, the raison d’etre of my ski seasons. Sometimes I wasn’t even excited for a few inches of new snow. Meh, maybe I would think about going skiing. Maybe.

Even if I went skiing, I wasn’t excited about it. Sometimes I felt like I had to go because I am a skier and that is what skiers do. And I’d be damned if I was going to lose the one last thing holding my identity together. I went for self defense rather than joy. Skiing was a bulwark to my identity. I kept skiing because I had to.

My ski days dwindled to twenty days a season, less than half as much as in years past. But it wasn’t just the quantity that suffered but also the quality. I was missing good days because I didn’t feel like skiing. When I did ski, I couldn’t ski as well because quantity of days helps build conditioning and endurance. The tough hard pack days make you a better skier. My skills began to atrophy. Things were going in the wrong direction.

Despite Cannon being my second most skied mountain, I have never been a season pass holder at Cannon. Much as I love the mountain, it gets less than half the annual snowfall of my northern Vermont favorites. Early season can be lean and glades are often slow to open when snowfall is not favorable.

But quality be damned, I desperately need quantity. Cannon is only forty minutes from home. With a pass, I have no excuse not to be at Cannon at least once a week. If not for a full day than at least for a few hours. Having the freedom to ski during the holiday breaks further adds a significant amount of days.

Today’s lesson about quantity over quality is that sometimes I can have both. I wouldn’t have had either today without the excuse of a season pass. After saying goodbye to family visiting for Thanksgiving, I went up to Cannon for an afternoon session. I found two to four inches new, enough for Cannon to open the entire front five complex (minus glades). The coverage was thin and the turns were fabulous.

Here is to a shit ton of both quantity and quality this season.