Having only ever skied Mount Ellen during the late spring, my knowledge and experience of the mountain has been limited to the Summit Quad. This was a sad omission in my skiing experience which was in need of remedy. With untracked snow from last week’s storm long gone at resorts across northern Vermont and with SkiVT Cards to burn, I pointed my car towards Sugarbush in pursuit of those wonderfully short lived feelings of novelty inspired by the wonder and bewilderment of new discoveries.

Sugarbush reported in with all trails open. But the reality is that most trails are really not worth skiing. My agenda this morning was to work the Northridge trails in quick secession before exploring the woods. But indications on my first few runs were that the woods should not wait one more run longer.

Groomers were fast hard pack with occasional scraped and frozen groomer tracks. Bumps featured either frozen or grass troughs, variable back sides, and often quite firm and unforgiving lines. Every time I started skiing a bump trail such as Exterminator, Bravo, Hammerhead, Cliffs, Encore, or Tumbler, I found myself pointing the skis into the woods in short order.

The trees skied wonderfully. Even the well traveled on map trails that were hammered had better packed snow than the exposed bump runs. But the best snow was in the trees off the map. Despite this being my first time tree skiing at Mount Ellen, my tree skiing radar is finely tuned and I found great trees on every run simply by keeping my eyes glued to the sides of the trails for those tell tale signs that rarely can be masked.

Amazingly, I found six inches of completely untracked fresh in several locations. Even more amazingly, those locations were sometimes very obvious shots in plain sight. Generally though, tighter lines in the soft woods were challenging and very thinly covered, and already hit hard enough to take out of commission until the next storm. Mid-mountain hard woods was where it was at. Lower Mountain trees were variable and often very thin. Skiable but with a snow pack that is not entirely safe.

(more…)