<I>(Note from the Administrator: This report was originally posted on 2/1/00. Due to our move to new servers, the date and time attributed to this post is incorrect.)</I> <BR> <BR>John Hood and our friends Liz and Phil (referred to collectively as "Phiz&Lil") and Karyn drove up Saturday night, but my non-skier girlfriend and I had ourselves a nice romantic trip to Northampton that day and came back late, so I drove up in the morning, having arranged to meet them at the base of the Peabody Quad at 10. <BR> <BR>Pulled into the Tramway parking lot a little after 9 and found it almost full. ?! I've *never* seen it this full; that's why I park there. Headed in and found the base lodge mobbed and a huge line for tickets. Silly me, having not called for a ski report, did not know until I got to the head of the line that it was a 2-for-1 day, but they guy behind me was also a single, so we doubled up for all of 10 seconds. (It's really odd to hear people hollering "Single!" in the *ticket* line.) By the time I finished booting up, the line was twice as long as when I got there; was really glad I bought the ticket first. Then there was about a 2-carload wait for the tram, with the result that my tram car alighted at the summit station at precisely 10:00. I figured they'd most likely wait, but I took the fastest and most direct route to Peabody base (Tramway->By-Pass->Lower Cannon) and didn't dawdle either. Pull up at the Quad and they're not there (but a <BR>whole lot of other people *are* there). It's really hard to recognize people in their ski clothes when you know them from non-skiing contexts. John, Phil and Karyn showed up about 10 minutes later; turned out they'd gotten a late start and then had a little equipment issue, where the rental shop didn't have the right kind of boots for Liz's snowboard, so she'd gone into Lincoln to rent or buy a pair there. Karyn was going to stay on the easy stuff, as was Liz when she got back, so Phil, John and I headed up the quad. <BR> <BR>We started off on the upper mountain, doing Ravine and then Taft->Upper Hardscrabble, and then headed down Middle Hardscrabble. Conditions were essentially nice soft powder over boilerplate (funny, that), except Middle Hardscrabble which was nice, soft powder over dirt, rocks and native vegetation. Finished that run with the usual howl down Redball (which I think of as the "reward" for getting down Middle or Lower Hardscrabble, being only accessible from those trails). For the rest of the morning, we ranged over most of the mountain, hitting Upper Cannon, Taft again, Middle Cannon, Paulie's Folly Extension, Avalanche and Banshee area. The old Banshee T-bar track, whose name I can't remember, had some nice fluff in it, but is about a ski-length wide with lots of low overhanging branches; made me glad of my helmet. <BR> <BR>This was probably the most crowded day I've ever seen at Cannon in my 20-plus years of skiing there; I could see from the tram that the Tramway satellite lots, the Peabody back parking lot and even the Echo Lake Beach lot were all full. The Peabody Quad sucks up all those skiers quite effectively, though; if the old Peabody double was still there, the line would probably be about a mile down I-93. Problem is, of course, that it spews all those skiers back out at the top. Cannon did a very nice job of widening and recontouring Middle Cannon and Ravine, the two main routes down from the Quad, so that those people have somewhere to go, but they and the Links (the two trails connecting the top of the Quad with the bottom of the Cannonball Express summit quad) got badly scraped up very quickly. Big Link in particular was just profoundly unpleasant by about noon; it was a steep narrow sheet of ice with randomly spaced bumps and, of course, lots of flailing skiers. Phil went down avoiding another skier our first time down it and almost took out John and I; next time I faceplanted one of those bumps and pulled a muscle in my shoulder slightly. <BR> <BR>After meeting Karyn and Liz for lunch, Phil and John and I figured it was time to take a run over to Mittersill. I hadn't actually done this in probably 10 years, having not been to Cannon on a good enough snow day with sufficiently skilled company in all that time. We were amused to see that someone had stolen a couple of chairs from the summit lodge and dragged them up to the top of Taft Race Course. TRC itself was quite nice, and even narrower than I remembered it. Baron's Run was a lot like Middle Hardscrabble, only with more snow. Down towards the bottom, though, it started to get ugly, and the cutoff back to Peabody base was a sea of dirt and loose rocks. I made an unfortunate turn across a rocky patch and stopped, and then some snowboarder went broadside across that same patch and stopped right above me. Ouch, what a sickening sound. <BR> <BR>We made a few more runs on the upper mountain (finding Vista Way to be a sea of death cookies), and then I and my achy legs called it a day at 3:30 while Phil and John took a last run up the tram. <BR> <BR>I found that my helmet's cooling vents work just fine as long as I'm moving. If I'm picking my way down a mogul field, they don't work as well, and of course that's when I most need them. Taking it off while riding up the lift helps a lot, though. My biggest regret about joining the helmet trend is that I then can't join the silly-fleece-hat trend. 
<BR> <BR>My legs hurt and my right shoulder is bothering me. A fine day indeed.
<BR> <BR>My legs hurt and my right shoulder is bothering me. A fine day indeed.