Mary at the bottom of "Heavenly Traverse"

Mary at the bottom of "Heavenly Traverse"

It is extremely difficult to comprehend how much snow is on the mountain tops at Killington right now. Three weeks ago, we had what locals are now calling our "January Thaw". Snow surfaces at the mountain and the number of open trails had shrunk dramatically. The season was just about dead. All you need to do is look at the snow stake picture for April 4th. We were down to 2 inches of snow at the inn, and the mountain was in a similar circumstance. How New England weather can be fickle.

This morning, the snow stake read 17 inches. If you take into account 2 or 3 inches of melting during the day on Wednesday (I try to take the snow stake pictures at 8:30 AM), yesterdays storm dropped almost 10 inches of snow around the inn by 8:30 AM this morning. The mountain is reporting another 18 inches on Killington peak. And from being up there this morning, it is not an exageration.

The storm we got yesterday can not be confused with the powder storm we got last week. Yesterdays storm dropped prime snow ball snow (I never thru any snow balls at cars when I was a kid... honest!...don't get any ideas..) On the mountain, the snow was packing into nice little bumps everywhere. Great for little squiggly turns, or broad but some what jarring traverses.

This morning, Killington Peak was still in the middle of yesterdays storm. Visibility was less than 200 feet in blowing and drifting snow combined with heavy cloud cover/fog. The mountain was reporting wind gusts over 30 MPH. This is where we started our morning.

Mary and I started with a few runs in the North Ridge area. Other than skiing by braille, snow surfaces were consistently soft and deep. If the sun were out, we might never had left, but as more people got to the top of the mountain, we decided to move over towards Bear, hoping the visibility would improve. Coming off Killington Peak was interesting. It was not until we got lower than the South Ridge Lift terminus that the cloud cover raised enough so that you could see the trails.

Bear Mountain was beautiful. Terrain features were still set up on Upper Bear Trap. Upper Bear Claw was minimally tracked. I did not have my powder skis on today, but my Fischer's had enough buoyancy to keep me on top of the surface. Viper Pit, Anti Venom, and Lower Bear Claw were all soft little bumps. Outer Limits and Lower Wildfire were all chopped up with bump lines just starting to appear with increasing skier traffic.

Over in the Needles Eye area, Cruise Control lived up to it's name. While making the traverse to Needles, we looked up slope on Skye Burst. After a box ride to the top of Skye Peak, on our next run we just had to go down it. Since it was not being serviced by the Skye Peak quad, almost no one had been on it. There was easily 1 to 2 feet of untracked snow from the middle of the trail out down skiers right. Without question, this was the one run of the day.

We did a run down Skye Lark to Bitter Sweet, at which time Mary had to leave to get back to the inn. I was expecting the Super Star quad to be running, it wasn't, so I traversed over to the Snowdon Quad. I did 5 runs off of Snowdon including Chute, North Star, Great Bear, Frolic to Vagabond, finishing up with a cruiser down Bunny Buster to Mouse Trap. Chute was nice little bumps. North Star, Great Bear, and Vagabond had large, yet soft bumps. The legs got a work out. But even after getting beaten up on North Star, I needed to take one more run, so I made it a cruiser down Bunny.

I perceive that skiing and riding this weekend at Killington should be pretty wild. With snow surfaces this deep and soft, and snow still falling on top of the mountain, it should be a great weekend to play in the mountains. And then of course, who knows what will happen next week.... Think Spring!...