Whiteface, NY 1/5/00

Jimski · Apr 17, 2000

(Note from the Administrator: This report was originally posted on 1/5/00. Due to our move to new servers, the date and time attributed to this post is incorrect.) All passengers please remain seated and fasten your seat belts. Please stow your dentures securely under your seat, we are expecting turbulence. When I started out this AM I was 6'0" and by 3:30 I was probably down to 5'11". I can't remember the last time I hurt more above the hips than below from skiing. I can be thankful for three things today; manmade snow and the durable base it makes, extreeeeeemly brutal grooming and rock skis. After coming off an excellent two week vacation over the holidays where I skied ten out of fifteen days and conditions continued to improve every day with more and more trails opening(no thanks to mother nature), today was quite a shocking experience,or if you would, bonejarring. Actually the cover was quite good, all things considered, but it consisted of petrified corduroy. Not a mogul to be found anywhere except a short line of practice type down the far side of Wilderness. I met up with my buddies Greg and Dave and we headed up the triple since the Gondola was down due to wind hold. We also suspected that the upper trails were totaled but were shocked to find out quite the opposite later in the day when the gondi opened. There were two options available on the face of little whiteface in Mt. Run and Wilderness. Thruway was open below the headwall but restricted for use by some bigtime race camp going on this week; lucky them. The head coaches are supposed to be Phil Maher and Diane Rolf-I aint gonna try spelling it. We headed up the Mt. Run double and did first run down the namesake. Yowsaa's, If it weren't for helmet straps mine probably would have vibrated off. Conditions were basically petrified corduroy,as I mentioned, with intermittent runoff ice slabs, exposed rock, and major, major, solid unmovable death cookies. I was skiing my Rossi rock skis that tracked as well as possible and were probably as stable as any option I could come up with but when the tips hit those "cookies" and they didn't move, the resulting ricochet made for touchy control to say the least. Wilderness wasn't much different. After a couple of runs down both of these we decided to take a run to the bottom on Lower Boreen. Amazingly good cover but all petrified washboard. It was weird to hear the vibration pitch of the skis "singing" internally through my body instead of externally through my ears. After a warmup break we headed back up the triple and decided to go all the way to the "coonpit". After we got above midstation we got an appreciation for why the gondi was not running. They had started placing snowguns out and the wind coming down off the top through Upper Valley Run was far more conducive to hang gliding than skiing. I was fully covered with face shield, helmet and goggles but the wind found some way to blast that spray around the goggles and through the breathing hole in the shield to result in painful stinging. The only beneficial effect; it you could call it that, of the windchill factor was that I never overheated during the day and could successfully ski without glasses fogging at all even with the faceshield and goggles. Upper Valley proved to be no different than anything else; surprising, huh, so we tried one each again on Mt. Run and Wilderness and headed in to midstation for a lunch break. Greg decided to call it quits after that and we all headed to the bottom to see him off and ski lower valley in the process. The diligent snowmaking crew was out and about setting guns all over that and we could wind our way down the trail following the drifting effect of the snowguns with minimal disruption from the icy base. This was refreshing, sort of, as long as you turned your face away as you passed the snowguns. Dave decided to try a few more runs with me and we headed back up the triple. About one tower up we realized the gondi was running and could see people actually riding in it. We did another quick run down lower valley, since this was the best anyway, and took the gondi up. It is rated at a seven minute ride at full speed but the auto wind sensor control system made it around a twelve minute ride. We were wondering what we would find for conditions at the top but welcomed the ride compared to the almost intolerable ride up the chairlifts. At the summit we found the offloading area and all of excelsior totally covered, at least on the uppermost ridge line. It was slightly more granular and softer than the lower mountain. We found the approach completely covered as far as we could see down it from the top but decided not to do that since it only went over to the face area and we been there , done that and it wasn't worth doing again. We found Essex open and fully covered and all the beautiful soft manmade snow moguls from last week totally flattened to a finer, not so petrified, corduroy that you could set a pretty decent edge on and not rattle your fillings out. Lower Northway was also covered with the same consistency except for occasional runoff icepack in a couple of places. Now we came out on upper valley without that painful chair ride and the snowguns were starting to make a significant difference in surface quality. As we passed midstation we noticed that they were densely activating snowguns on Mt. Run. Usually the best runs of the day are the first but in this case they were improving more as the day went on. A run down lower valley was in order and I decided to switch to my Volkl's since the conditions were improving. We finished with two more runs up the gondi and got some good turns under the snowguns each time. We did one last run up Mt. Run lift and skied under the snowguns all the way down that. The swirling intensity was so dense that you couldn't see more than a couple of feet ahead but boy was it nice compared to earlier. The day started out as a one on a one to ten scale of skiing in my book and ended up on a three or four and I would actually say that I have had two worse days earlier this season. It was still better than a good day at work as the skiers code says.

Whiteface, NY 1/5/00

Jimski

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