Mary and our friend Walt on the Canyon Quad

Mary and our friend Walt on the Canyon Quad

When Killington is bad...well we live here...If you read my blog often you know what a picture of Johnny Boys means. But on other days, Killington is great. And today was one of them.

Today was not a powder day. The sunshine was not out, in fact it was snowing on the mountain all morning. The grooming was not perfect. The firm ice of the last couple of days has been groomed out, leaving beach sand and cookies on many of the trails. But today was one of those lift to lift, hard skiing, black diamond days that can only happen on the east coast at Killington.

Today from the get go, Killington had almost all of their lifts turning, at full operating speed. In the space of 2 hours and 15 minutes, we took 14 lifts skiing exclusively black and double black diamond terrain with only one ride to the top of the mountain (the first) on the K1 gondola. It was probably the hardest, most concentrated, morning of skiing we have done at Killington in a couple of years. And if it were not for work around the inn, we would still probably be out on the hill.

We started the day riding the Canyon Quad. Usually this chair is not running during the week. So it was a pleasure to see it running first thing this morning. We looped through the entire canyon area. Cascades and East Fall were in nice shape, worthy of multiple do overs. Double Dipper was groomed flat, but still very firm and slick. As the 3rd run of the day, it was not for the faint of heart, but the group we were with is made up of very technically proficient skiers, so we all just ripped down Double Dippers compound fall line.

After the Canyon area, we bypassed the K1 Base Lodge by skiing across the top of the mountain via Launch Pad to Superstar. Superstar, Skye Lark, Bittersweet were all better than yesterday, having experienced another groom overnight to break up a lot of the residual cookies. On our run down Bittersweet, we noticed that the Needle Eye Quad was also running, so we looped over there to finish the morning.

Needles Eye had 2 to 3 inches of ground up snow from top to bottom. I did several loops down skiers left. The snow was not conducive to bump formation, but because of the depth of the beach sand, plenty of turns were required. And then to top it off we were presented with Vertigo, groomed out from top to bottom.

Clearly Vertigo had probably only had one pass of grooming, as there were a lot of chucks along the trail. But the headwall was as sweet as can be, with no ice or slick spots. Vertigo's headwall supported a nice series of tight turns, which carried all the way through to the Snow Shed cross over. Now if we only had a couple of feet of champagne powder on top??? But I am getting greedy.

Let it snow.