Thanksgiving Holiday Weekend in New England, a time of blackout dates on Special Offers and crowded slopes at the larger ski resorts. With a marginal early season snow wise in which many ski areas were pushing opening days back and Non-Crystalline Precipitation had fallen fallen twice, not many solid options were available. I decided to do the previously unthinkable and make the trek up to Killington Vermont which was the only New England ski area that could offer up decent pitched trails and bumps. While the parking lot was quickly filling up, I paid the man a ridiculous $49 for a little over 20 trails and boarded the K1 Gondola.

From the Summit of Killington, I quickly tracked down Great Northern which is one of Killington’s many throw away connector trails. Today, Great Northern was more than just a connecting trail, it was a novice skiers’ only option from the summit which made it a trail to be avoided at all costs throughout the day. Bailing to the right onto an already scraped down Lower Reason was probably not the best option. I took the Northern Ridge Triple back up and tried Upper Rime where snow blowers were going top to bottom, a definite turn off. I quickly abandoned all the upper mountain trails on Killington Peak and held on for dear life skiing the middle portion of Great Northern where I managed to find some rocks which I threw back into the woods going down skiers left.

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Killington was the first ski area to open for the 2004-2005 skiing season on Tuesday November 9, 2004. I claimed my first tracks of the season two days later on a Veterans Day Holiday. Being freed of work obligations for the day had me setting my alarm one hour early and having the wheels spinning by 5:30AM. Along the way, I discovered that New Order is great pre-skiing music and that Vermont schools do not have Veterans Day off which was an early sign that crowds would not be as bad as I had anticipated.Arriving at KBL (now renamed K1BL for what it’s worth) at exactly 8:15AM, I hit the lodge and picked up a free ticket courtesy of Killington for attending the latest Warren Miller film in Boston called Impact. After some minor confusion about which window to obtain my free lift ticket from, I booted and suited up and ascended via the K1 Gondi with my P40 Platinums. Unfortunately, my preferred and 10cm shorter P50 Motions were still in the shop. I made due with my longer backup boards which had my quads burning early!

The best thing about the first run is that for the rest of the season, your skiing can never get any worse. It sets the standard for the absolutely worst you could possibly ski which is a comforting thought given my rather forced and unnatural turns. I am trying not to blame it on the skis, but after a year of skiing on 183cm skis it was really tough going back and adjusting to something that is 193cm long. I pretty much had the longest skis on the mountain that I noticed.

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