Mt Snow VT 4/12 & 4/15, '02

[cd]

Sorry this is a bit 'after the fact'..... <BR> <BR> Fri 4/12: Well, the fat lady was doing her sound check at Snow. They'd announced a closing of Sunday 4/14 (thank Ullr for that 2 feet in March or it would've been way earlier!) so I went up on the Friday to get some last weekday-pass tracks. The front face was pretty sparse, tho still no walking, but the north face still had solid cover on almost all trails. Beautiful warm day with cream-of-wheat spring conditions. Ripcord especially nice, with reliably edgeable surface on the steeps (I still say that Ripcord is one of the steepest (if not exactly the longest) in the east, IMO steeper than Kmart's Outer Limits tho maybe rivalled by parts of Devil's Fiddle and the headwalls of Ovation and Superstar). The upper third of the north face trees still had nice solid cover and even lower was possible depending on how much one wanted to play 'thread the needle' by finding the thin connections between larger snow patches (and I had a helluva lot of fun doing just that!) <BR> <BR>Mon.4/15: Well the fat lady had played her set and had left the building, on to the next gig (she's booked at a lot of ski areas these days). I remembered well the posting here last year about someone happening upon an 'employee appreciation day' at Snow the day after closing, with a lift running and the possibility of riding same even if one was not an employee. I'd asked a friendly liftie on Fri if there was going to be such an event on Monday and he said yes. Even tho it had rained that morning, skies were clearing so I drove up to Snow to see if I could benefit from the employee party... <BR> <BR> ...well, I got up there and it was a ghost town, with no sign of any running lift or party of any sort. Doh, wrong call! Ah well, I was there so it was time for plan B. I loaded up the boots and skis onto the back pack and hoofed it instead! Had fun inspecting the flotsam and jetsam under the newly melted liftline- picked up a couple of spare baskets! I hiked almost to the summit, to the top of Ripcord. The rain had left a pitted, but still quite edgeable, surface. I skied the top half of Ripcord a few times then did it top to bottom (I wasn't up to hiking up the steepest lower section). I then hiked the short mellow uphill crossover to the top of the Canyon lift and skied down the front face more or less under the Canyon, a (OK, just about the only) slope which still had excellent cover until the very bottom. Still counts as a day out in my book! <BR> <BR> As I write this I'm sure that Snow's remaining cover all but disappeared under last weeks heat wave, tho I bet that the nice thick cover on Ripcord is still sitting there isolated in the north face shadows. Went to Kmart once during the heatwave and it was sublime, tho it was a good bit ahead of schedule in the melting timeline. What the hell, it's snowing up there now which may help at least a little bit.