Yesterday at Jay was nice. Today at Mad River was better. Three days ago, Mad River announced that it would not open this weekend. But the forecast turned in favor of General Stark Mountain and opening day was set. A foot of dense fresh setup perfectly on the limited but existing base. All trails were open on occasionally thin but ample coverage. Bottomless it was not but cheers and shouts of joy rang out across the mountain, nonetheless.
Somewhere north of the Notch, my car’s temperature display dipped into the double digits. The negative double digits. I started questioning whether the drive to Jay would be worth while. The snow that fell earlier in the week would surely be tracked out, right? Jay’s recent snowfall combined with quite expansive terrain offerings would bring out the crowds, right?
Wrong. On both counts.
The below average temperatures of November benefited Cannon tremendously. Terrain is opening at a significantly faster rate than last year. Today’s offerings included two fully unique routes from the Peabody Quad along with Gary’s and Rocket from the Zoomer Chair.
That doesn’t sound like much but some of these routes and trails are seriously wide (especially Gary’s and Rocket) and take a substantial amount of fire power to get them open. There is even a decent sized terrain park near the lodge. Last year, the Zoomer chair had not even opened yet whereas this year it is on its second week.
Snow making is in place on Middle Cannon, Middle/Lower Ravine, the Links, the Huckerbrook area, and the Zoomer base area (presumably in preparation for blowing Zoomer and Avalanche). I don’t recall ever seeing as many guns blowing at the same time at Cannon.
Despite arriving well after first chair, surfaces were edgeable hard pack and generally fun to ski. This excepts a few constricted high traffic areas that sported excessively scrapped down snow. Loose snow was plentiful along the edges of Gary’s and Rocket. Packed powder it was not. But it wasn’t bad skiing either.
Of all the mountains that I might suspect to score a “day after the powder day” powder day (during a holiday period), Mad River Glen is not a prime suspect. But adventurous woods skiing yielded everything from packed powder to loose fluff to honest to goodness completely untracked lines, two days after a holiday weekend storm. Friggin’ sweet!
I wasn’t expecting expansive off map opportunities but Mad River Glen delivered. Throughout the morning I kept thinking “there is no way that such and such a shot is going to ski well” and invariably I would try it and score excellent snow and quality turns. Despite the “woods are thin” signage at the Single, I found the off map woods to be very well covered and one dump away from being chargeable.
When I got home from Jay, I dejectedly flopped down into my chair and started flipping through trip reports. I quickly found myself at the NY Ski Blog reading Harvey’s latest post on ski touring right outside his backdoor. And the thought occurred to me that I could keep reading about other people skiing or I could head outside my own backdoor and earn some turns myself. There was only an hour and a half of daylight left but I could just barely squeeze it in.
I quickly ran through the house and gathered up my touring gear. Much to my chagrin, I later discovered that I had been too hasty in gathering my gear. While applying my skins in the howling wind, I cried out in dismay as I realized that I had the wrong pair of skins! I applied a quick fix that worked and commenced skinning on skins that were 3cm short of full width coverage and 10cm short in the tail.