Sugarbush, VT 3/30/00

Jay Silveira

New member
<I>(Note from the Administrator: This report was originally posted on 3/31/00. Due to our move to new servers, the date and time attributed to this post is incorrect.)</I> <BR> <BR>Yesterday I visited Sugarbush for a few runs with my friend Mango. It wasn't really a planned trip, but when I found out that VT ski areas had received up to 10 inches of snow (snowfall has been a bit slow the past couple of weeks), I decided to make a few turns. Sugarbush had reported 2-3" new at the base, and 10" at the summit. The weather was basically just overcast with sprinkles and a temperature in the high 30s for most of the trip from Burlington. Even Duxbury at 1100' didn't have totally consistent snow coverage. They did have patchy snow, which Mango said was a bit more than they had last week. We arrived in Waitsfield, still bare, and even as we started up the Sugarbush access road, there was no new snow noticeable until we hit the 1300' mark. It began here as patchy snow, and very quickly, by 1500' (this was around the German Flats road intersection), there was consistent coverage of about an inch. Once we got to the parking lot (near 1600') the snow was up to about 2 inches of slushy accumulation where they had not salted it. <BR> <BR>We jumped on the Super Bravo lift to head up for the deeper snow above. We took Birdland to get to Heaven's Gate, and found old crusty bumps underneath about 6 inches of new snow. The skiing was tough as the wind filled in the troughs and made the bumps just about invisible. We got off Heaven's Gate and hiked up the short slope to the summit. In some places it was wind scoured to bare grass and rock, in others there was over a foot of new snow. We headed down Jester and found nice fresh snow remaining on many of the corners. It was probably about 10% H20, and you had to work a bit to turn the skis but it was a good 10 inches deep. As we descended the mountain, the snow gradually got heavier and heavier. By the time we got down to around 2400', it was probably in the 12% range and instead of being fluffy, it was more on the chunky side (see images). We got some great fresh turns on Ravenna's Way and Snowball, having the trails entirely to ourselves. It was fun to explore different methods of skiing the heavy powder, and I can distinctly recall having some really fun turns as I hit the big right hand corner of Snowball. We also got some more low elevation fresh tracks on Moonshine, where Mango enjoyed the bumps. Here the wind had not filled in the bumps with snow and an even coating of about 6 inches made for some fun, albeit somewhat sticky, lines. <BR> <BR>As we left, it started to dump snow really hard; big wet <BR>flakes. As soon as we dropped a few hundred feet below the base elevation (back down at around 1300' again), the snow turned to pouring rain. It poured for much of our trip back so I bet they'll got a few more inches last night <BR> <BR>Images associated with this report (4 images) can be viewed at: <BR>www.uvm.edu/~jsilveir/30MAR00.html
 
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