Titus Mt., NY 2/17/00

[Jimski]

<I>(Note from the Administrator: This report was originally posted on 2/20/00. Due to our move to new servers, the date and time attributed to this post is incorrect.)</I> <BR> <BR>What a fantastic bluebird day to have planned off from work several months ago. I originally thought I might take in the Good Will Games but when Shirley said she would like to log more ski time with me I readily changed plans. <BR> <BR>We wandered North to Titus Mt. near Malone NY and found everything 100% open with the best velvet rolled powder I think I ever skied on. It snowed a ton over the last week and everything was completely covered with natural snow. No matter how hard you dug the edges anywhere on the mountain you couldn't hit ice or any hard manmade. Another nice thing they do is to leave half, or sometimes both edges, of the more challenging trails unrolled and loose for powder lovers to gorge in. It was high shin to almost knee deep and just really sweet to point 'em straight down the fall line and dance. Never feeling a crunch, scrape of scratch by the edges was sheer ecstasy. With the relatively small crowd due to being a weekday I could let loose and really do some deep hypercarving on my freshly shop tuned Elans. Shirley was getting better on "almost" parallel turns and using the restriction of the one or two width groomer swaths to practice tighter turns. I would cruise the powder off to the side of the trail practicing how tight and symmetrical I could crank out s-carves. All day long I could make fresh tracks. <BR> <BR>We won't open the discussion of what constitutes a black diamond again but while I was cranking powder turns Shirley would get to the bottom and be waiting patiently at the lift line for me. Several times I would come to a halt with the skis pointing straight down the hill and have to "kick start" the run again. I credit this to the powder depth and moderate pitch of the trails. Well Shirley was having a grand old time. She skied every black diamond trail on the mountain and wants the world to know about it. There was one new trail that I had never skied before on the upper mountain called outer edge I believe. It's somewhat narrower and winds a bit to the left of the upper triple as you ride up. As we rode up the lift Shirley pointed out where skiers had been darting in and out of the trees along the edge and asked me if she did that would it count as glade skiing. I told her if I actually witnessed her go around a tree it would count as glade skiing in my book. Later when she got a little cold and wanted to go in for a short break I took one run and went further over into cleared, but not fully developed, woods area off that trail. It was untouched powder and glade density similar to Sutton. It funneled into an ever increasingly tight exit back out onto the trail that I had to straight run with my hands in front of my face to avoid thick thorn bushes and saplings. Thank goodness it didn't drop six feet straight down into the trail like the one at Sutton. Thank goodness I also didn't straddle any of those thorn bushes, those suckers were huge. <BR> <BR>We took it easy and headed out at 3:30 to save energy for a much bigger excursion the next day to Gore Mt. We both rated this day as a 10 in our book.