Looking up Skyeburst from the old Snowshed crossover.

Looking up Skyeburst from the old Snowshed crossover.

Sometimes interesting can be good. Other times, interesting can be bad. But most of the time, interesting is just interesting. And that just about describes todays ski journey around the Killington resort.

Today was Mary's first venture on to the slopes in 2010. The inn is settling down from the holidays. We still have quite a few people staying with us thru the week, but the pace has slowed a bit, allowing everyone to breathe a little easier. Around the inn, the Christmas decorations are beginning to disappear. The march of the snowmen, invading Birch Ridge, is imminent.

Mary and I got to the mountain late today, by our standards, arriving near the crack of 11 AM. Killington Peak was totally covered in a dark, foreboding cloud. A light, weird, snow-mist combination was falling from the sky. Temperatures were in the high teens with a light wind. We parked in the K1 parking lot, near the Snowdon Quad. Mary had put her boots on back at the inn. I slipped mine on in the parking lot... then off we went. Well sort of...

Turns out, while I was putting my boots on, the Snowdon Quad went down for some reason. The rope was put up blocking the corral, so instead of boosting up to get to Killington Peak, we skied down Great Northern, thru the ski tunnel between Rams Head and Snow Shed and wound up on the Snowshed Express Quad. From their, we took a left turn down High Road and found ourselves in Needles Eye.

After a relatively quick trip in the Skyeship Gondola to Skye Peak, we traversed off the back and headed over to Bear Mountain. When we left the K1 parking lot, the light was down right dreadful. At Skye Peak, although there were still some heavy clouds in the sky, the visibility was improved. What had been dark at K1 could now be best described as dim. But the snow was nice!

Bear Claw, Wildfire, and Skye Burst were similar to my ski day on Monday. All had some minor wind blown patches in places, with the majority of the trails covered with a top layer of several inches of dry powder. You needed to pay attention on the crests of drop offs along the trails in the dim light, but that's good practice anyway.

Cruise Control, Needles Eye, and Dream Maker all were skiing well. Outer Limits was open. Snow guns were pounding OL so we took a pass.

Coming back to the Basin side of the resort, Skyelark, Bittersweet, and Superstar were "interesting". Snow guns were going strong on parts of Superstar and the length of Skyelark. The wind was blowing everything on to Bittersweet. Combined with the dim light, visibility was near zero in spots along the trail. This was particularly true in the mixing zones where trails intersected. The peak area where people from the Skye Ship exit to Skyelark was particularly treacherous with copious snow drifts hidden in a fog of mist from snow guns and dim light.

Except for the visibility, Bittersweet was quite fun. The snow surface was soft due to new snow making. The resort did play a few tricks on skiers leaving enormous whales of snow all over the trail. On middle Bittersweet, in the dark with blowing snow, the new snow piles were medium sized. On lower Bittersweet, some were literally over 10 feet high. The good news is the visibility had improved considerably on lower Bittersweet, so riding up and over the snow whales was a lot of fun.

Light snow is continuing to fall at the resort. Taking into account snow compression, the new snow is not amounting to much, but it is keeping everything nice and white and fresh. Somewhere there is a tradeoff between dim light, bright sunshine, and falling snow. I am not sure where it exactly is... but for now, I will take the dim light as long as it keeps snowing at Killington.....let it snow!