Jay Silveira
New member
<I>(Note from the Administrator: This report was originally posted on 1/11/00. Due to our move to new servers, the date and time attributed to this post is incorrect.)</I> <BR> <BR>On Sunday I headed to Sugarbush with my friend E. We were meeting our friend Chris at 8:30 and hoped to find a little of the powder left from Saturday at Mt. Ellen. No such luck. Inverness was still closed for racing, and all the snow that I had skied in on Saturday was blown away, tracked up, or just generally settled into a minimal layer covering the rocks and ice. Thus we decided to stick to the snowmaking trails. We wound up with a sweet surprise, finding upper FIS blasted with snow from the snow guns, and a large caked-on layer of soft manmade hid its normally icy facade. It's a rare event to get soft turns on FIS like that so we did two runs. By the second run, things were already wearing away on FIS, but we still found great soft snow on the trails that had been groomed. The snow on Looking Good was so soft, that you almost couldn't hear the people passing below you. <BR> <BR>Around 11:00, we headed to the half pipe. We had seen the pipe dragon working its magic on the half pipe in the morning so we decided to check it out. I normally cringe at the thought of catching air in one of those ice-filled tubes, but the thing was looking really nice, and only the lip was really icy (which I think is almost a necessity or else it would just break down too fast.) I did a couple of runs and E got up with the other photographers and shot some video. The thing that annoys me a bit is the whole queue system for who goes next. Half the people are sitting there with their boards on, just watching, but some of these people are also planning to drop in, eventually I guess? It's intimidating enough to have to line up in front of this big audience, but then you have to sit there and basically "guess" when you can go. They need to have a separate staging area for those that are watching, and a spot for people to line up who plan to go. I'm not sure how it is at all half pipes, but it just seems a bit disorganized. I am happy to see that there were other skiers in the pipe as well, and everybody was getting along well. Hopefully the days are gone in which skiers are shunned from the pipe. I think areas should start building quarter pipes as well, that would be sweet. <BR> <BR>After finishing up at the pipe, we hopped in the car and headed over to Sugarbush south.. E and I hit the snowboards for about an hour or so on the village double, while Chris went off on his skis to check out the rest of the mountain. Eventually, we met up with James, and his friend Kim, who was having her first day ever on skis through the free learn to ski deal. The sun poked in and out much of the day, and the temperatures were in the 30s, quite nice at the lower elevations. The trail count was up to 56, from 49 the previous day, so they are hopefully starting to build things up after the rain. <BR> <BR>Images associated with this report can be viewed at: <BR>http://www.uvm.edu/~jsilveir/09JAN00.html