Snow guns crushing lower Skye Burst

Snow guns crushing lower Skye Burst

It was nice to go skiing today, instead of being behind a 500lb snow blower for 3 hours. Don't get me wrong. We love snow. But we also love to get out and play in it as well.

Skiing and riding today at the Killington Resort were full on min-winter conditions. While there were peeks of blue sky on occaision, for the most part todays activities took place in temperatures that were in the low 20's under light cloud hanging at about 4100 feet.

Our ski journey today took us to Bear Mountain, Skye Peak, Killington Peak and Snowdon.

At Bear Mountain, aggressive snow making was taking place on Wildfire and Skye Burst. Surfaces were loose machine made fresh powder. My new skiis handled fairly well in the stuff, once I stopped making aggressive, tail bashing, turns. it is clear that the resort was going all out to make sure that conditions at Bear Mountain will be excellent during the holidays. Given all of the snow that has fallen in the area in the last 10 days, it would have been easy for the resort to pass on making new snow. To their credit, they have gone in the opposite direction, taking advantage of the colder tempertures to make a very high quality product.

From Bear Mountain we took our normal loop over to the Needles Eye area. We did not ski Needles, as it has basically stayed all bumpded and knarly from last weekend. We did do Cruise Control several times. it was set up nicely as a high speed groomer. We also went down Vertigo. The steep headwall of Vertigo was fairly flat. The surface was hard, but not ice. Making deliberate turns down the Vertigo headwall was easily achievable.

Also on Skye Peak, Bitter Sweet, Sky Lark and Superstar were all skiing nice. Middle Superstar was a little choppy from grooming machines working the hardpack, but the Upper and Lower headwalls were in nice condition.

Over on Killington Peak, the Canyon area is also seeing heavy snow making. Every available snow gun position was in use on Double Dipper to make snow on that trail. it was an impressive display of the power of the resorts snow making system, even though it made for a cold and noisy ride on the Canyon Quad.

With cold weather in place for at least the next couple of days, expect the resort to continue to make snow in many areas. It shoudl be a very good holiday period of skiing and riding at Killington.

Let it snow!