Okemo 11/11 Opening Day

[GregB]

<I>(Note from the Administrator: This report was originally posted on 11/12/99. Due to our move to new servers, the date and time attributed to this post is incorrect.)</I> <BR> <BR>I had Veterans Day off from work so I decided to do opening day at Okemo. I was expecting two ways down the mountain but there was only one. You had to take a bus from the base area to the bottom of the Northstar Express Quad. Everyone on the bus was singing "the wheels on the bus go round and round..........". Once at the top of the Northstar you skied down Countdown for about 100 feet onto Upper World Cup, all of Upper World Cup was covered and then it cut onto Drop Off down to the Glades Peak Quad. Once you got to the top of the Glades Peak you had to ski down Buckhorn back to the top of Northstar Quad. That was it. One run down (the four to one trail naming ratio applies here). I got up to the top around 10:00 and the middle of the trail was all ready down to bullet proof hard pack. Someone said the first tracks in the morning were death cookies because of the rain the night before. All the trees at the summit were covered in ice. The sides of the trail was death cookies and loose granular on top of hard pack but the sun was beating down on the skiers left side so it was getting softer as the day went on. There was a nice kicker on Drop Off that the boarders were congregating around. There were many more boarders there than skiers. By 2:30 the trail was pretty much a sheet of bulletproof hard pack and the temps were dropping fast so I down loaded on the Northstar Quad and called it a day. It was a blue jay day with temps in the twenties. They were making snow all day on Defiance, Lower World Cup, and other trails on the other side of the mountain but only from the summit to about half way down. When I down loaded in the afternoon, the guns were going on Lower World Cup all the way to the bottom on the Northstar Express so they will probably be top to bottom soon. Their ski report this morning reports more train open today.