A
Anonymous
Guest
My friend had the day off so we had planned on heading over to Sugarbush for some morning turns. In Shelburne (5-10 minutes south of Burlington), we had received about 1-2 inches of snow. We were hoping for some nice accumulations in the mountains, but knew that the variability might be high from point to point with this somewhat minor system / lake effect snow combination. We went the back route towards Appalachian Gap, and found, surprisingly, a bit less snow in parts of the Huntington area. We had just begun our climb over the Appalachian Gap, and we clicked to the radio to hear Steve Maleski's VPR weather report. He said that snowfall varied quite a bit, but that 10 inches had been reported at Mt. Ellen! (one of the prominent peaks of Sugarbush). We hurried ourselves up toward the top of the gap, watching as the snow depth increased to about 8 inches, and finally dropped down to just a couple of inches by the time we hit bottom in the Mad River Valley. Sugarbush is uploading on the Super Bravo, and skiing is off Downspout / Jester, and Organgrinder. We weren't all that early, but there were still nice areas of powder along the edges of the trails. Hard pack was certainly evident in the middle of trails at times, but no real ice. We hiked up above the Heaven's Gate lift to catch some fresh turns, and found thigh deep snow that we had to slog through on the wind loaded eastern side. There certainly was 8-12 inches of fresh snow at the top, surprisingly light. My estimates are about 7-8% H20, which suggests that the temperatures dropped down pretty low at that elevation. We shot a couple of short video sequences in the powder, and finished off the day with a trip to Organgrinder. Lots of loose snow on Organgrinder, very little hard stuff. While we were downloading, we noticed a couple of folks that had decided to ski out to the bottom instead. It looks possible, but at the base there were only 3-4 inches so it might be a little rocky. Another foot of snow and they should be on the verge of opening the natural snow trails off Heaven's Gate as they have the past few seasons. It was still snowing hard when we left (approx. 10:45 A.M.), and although it's supposed to taper off, things look good for the Thanksgiving period.