Mount Snow 12/21 & 12/22 2008

[method9455]

We made it up here this morning only a few minutes behind first chair, but it was a pretty tough drive, lots of pushing, lots of shoveling, and a frontside 180 with the car on a downhill curve, nice. Ridiculous day of riding, it started snowing hard on our drive up at around 4am and it is still snowing that hard at 8pm, thats on top of the 18" they got yesterday. Really light stuff, really windy so I guess its east coast blower. I got my dumb ass stuck several times today trying to explore some of the deeper parts of the windblown stuff. Apparently a 156cm board won't float my dumb ass when it gets above knee deep. Danielle stayed in the 12" deep stuff and had a lot less trouble. I got some pictures that I will post when we are home but at the moment we've been up for 16 hours on 2 hours of sleep so I'm not going to get a full TR just yet.

[toast21602]

pics or it didnt happen.

[method9455]

pics or it didnt happen.

 

Don't worry, I got plenty

[AtomicSkier]

More like 13" Friday and Saturday. About 14" today. Should be some nice wind loaded stashes tomorrow!

[method9455]

A bit more detail:

 

Saturday: Woke up around lunchtime and packed up for the semester, hit the road and got home around 3. Unpacked my school stuff, repacked the car to head to vermont. Took a good look at the weather and the "do not go out on the roads if you don't have to tonight" warnings on the weather channel, and over the protests of both of our parents decided we could beat the storm if we left early. Went to bed at 11pm, set the alarm for 2am.

 

Sunday: Woke up at 2am, took a quick shower and make a cup of coffee. Danielle picked me up at 2:30 and we hit the road. Luckily our timing was good and we made it to about Poughkeepsie before the snow flakes started falling doing about 60mph instead of my usual 80. The snow did start getting heavy once we got up near Hunter/Windham but they were salting and plowing pretty well. Once we got within about 20 miles of Mount Snow things got a lot worse. It didn't seem to be a problem going uphill but those downhill turns were really slippery. I was coming down pretty much the last downhill on the way into Wilmington and I braked too late and started to slide right for a road sign, I steered out of that but over corrected and ended up spinning us completely around and we went right off the road. We hit the snow bank on the side of the road at about 20mph but it was light and fluffy so not even a scratch on the car, though it did take some shovelling to get it out and a few guys stopped and we pushed it out. You can see in the picture at this point there is about 4" of snow on the ground.

 

 

We made it up to the mountain only about 30 minutes after first chair, we would have definitely made it for opening if we hadn't spun out and we even had time to stop for a big breakfast. Cue awesome powder day pictures. I didn't really pull the camera out because we were having too much fun but here are a few random shots. Plenty of untracked to be found, it snowed all day. The North Face was a bit more tracked than anywhere else because all the locals were there, but the glades had plenty of snow. We found a lot of the south side of the main face was being ignored and had huge swaths of powder on it. We skied from 8:30 to 3:30 with 2 or 3 breaks. It was pretty damn cold, I think the wind chill was 0, but we had too much fun to really worry about it. I forgot my face mask at home so I had to use a bandanna which sucked cuz it kept freezing solid, but it was better than nothing. I would say it was about knee deep. AtomicJeff says 14", the locals were saying 18", honestly who could know because the wind was blowing it around so much it was between a foot to 3 feet depending on the location. Definitely the lightest snow I've ever ridden in was a blast. i wouldn't say there were face shots but you could hit a patch here and there that burst up to waist high, what a great time.

 

 

Monday:

 

I have no still pictures from this day because it was brutally cold. 2 degrees and a windchill of -15 doesn't make you want to take off your gloves and snap some pictures. The wind overnight was about 50mph, it really shook the place we were staying. On the hill, the summits lifts were closed because of wind (I felt like i was at camelback, but honestly, I didn't want to go up there). The snow had migrated all over the place and what had been great the day before was bare and what had sucked the day before had a huge amount of untracked. We hit some fun trails but the cold was killing us and we took 3 or 4 breaks inside to warm up. I started doing a lot of powder ollies which led to some awesome times, but also a lot of wipe outs. I did a big shifty under one of the lifts and landed it so went for a 180 off another bump, and caught my nose on the landing and did the classic tumble down the powder field over and over you always see in the snowboarding videos. It didn't feel that great to have snow inside the helmet as well as completely filling the goggles, but still fun.The high point of the day was hitting a trail that had a few brooks in it you had to ollie over, along with 2 downed trees (still a lot of those from the ice storm around), it took a while to get down but made it really interesting. We left the hill around 1:30 to head for home, and after lunch in town were seriously on the road by 3. The drive home took a long time, and was actually worse than the drive up. Lots of slippery stuff on the roads and we didn't spin out as bad as before but we had a mild slide into a guardrail that had us both holding our breath to see if there was real damage (there wasn't, about 5" of snow plastered to the guardrail protected our paint) and a half spin out on route 100. It took about 3 hours to get to albany when it usually should take about an hour, but from there south was dry roads and we made good time.

 

I did break out my video camera on Monday for the first time, but I haven't looked at the tape yet so I don't know if there is anything worth seeing. I doubt it because I was just getting used to trying to hold it steady while riding but I'll see.

 

As for the park on carinthia, it looked good but honestly I only took 1 run through it. I'm not going to be hitting the park on a powder day, but I should try it another day soon.

[AtomicSkier]

Nice pics man! Twas epic in VT, for sure.

 

As far as Monday, I used the exact same words, "Brutally Cold". It was cold.

[RidgeRacer]

Sweet photos Kevin. The last one is great.

[midster3]

Just got back from Mt. Snow. Figured I didn't need to start another thread because my info is basically the same.. I have some pictures I will put up later tonight. I was there Friday night through this morning and it was unbelievable. Working on the photos now.