June Buttner, owner of
The Boutique at Killington,
showing good form on Superstar.

June Buttner, owner of
The Boutique at Killington,
showing good form on Superstar.

For the first time in many days, when I woke up this morning the sun was shining and it was not snowing outside. With temperatures this morning in the high 20's, ski conditions at Killington were ideal for late season cruising and playing in the bumps.

Our first few runs this morning were in the Canyon area. East Fall and Double Dipper were both groomed soft and sweet. While neither took a lot of energy to ski as they were groomed flat, the side to side sweeping turns we made going down them at considerable speed were exhilarating just the same. To get the blood flowing in my legs, during several of our runs I entered the area through the bumps in FIS. The beautiful, soft, well spaced bumps on FIS were just enough in the early stage of the morning to get all of the muscles moving and warmed up.

We then traversed over the top of the mountain, via Great Eastern and Launch Pad to play over at Superstar. Superstar had not been groomed overnight. Middle Superstar was covered with very soft mounds of snow, not bumps yet, but precursors formed by people pushing soft snow around. You could basically cruise Middle Superstar over and around the mounds, making as many turns as you wanted to keep your speed under control. The Upper and Lower headwalls of Superstar were basically flat. They both were firm, but also covered in a soft snow which gave both of them a nice, consistent surface.

Later in the morning, I journeyed over to Bittersweet while the gang cruised down middle Skyelark. Bittersweet was covered with nice soft bumps. Most of the bump troughs on Bittersweet were filled with soft snow, but a few in high traffic locations were showing some scratch. As by now the temperatures had crossed the freezing level, it was too warm to call these locations ice as they were moist and edge-able. But on another day, if temps were well below freezing, I would probably be calling these spaces blue ice. At any rate, I made it through the bump field on middle Bittersweet before any of the others met me at the junction between High Road and Bittersweet..so the bumps did not slow me down at all.

Crowds today on the mountain were light. As it was such a beautiful day, we saw many local business owners out skiing and riding. Because everyone is funneled into the K1 box at some time during the day, there was a lot of socializing going on, chatting about the winter, vacation plans, the pending sale of the mountain, etc... That is until the doors opened at Kpeak....at which point everyone scattered to take their runs before meeting at the bottom again. Overall, just a gorgeous ski day in this wacky winter that would not start and now will not end.

Speaking of winter, the weather service is calling for a major winter storm to move through the area starting around midnight this evening. 12 inches are forecasted for central Vermont with snow predicted to fall all day long on Thursday. Let it snow!