Whiteface, NY 12/11/99

[Jimski]

<I>(Note from the Administrator: This report was originally posted on 12/12/99. Due to our move to new servers, the date and time attributed to this post is incorrect.)</I> <BR> <BR>I woke up Saturday to the muffled drone of a snowplow cruising up my street. Drifts in the driveway were up over the hubcaps on my vehicle so I thought it would be a great day. Not quite! The more exciting winter adventure was the 20 mile trip to the Mt. on the roads with the wind and drifting and poor visibility. My snowboarding daughter and I wandered into the base lodge at just before 10:00AM and found a crowd just hanging around looking bored. We found out that only the Mixing Bowl beginners chairlift was operating due to the high winds which had dropped a tree limb onto a power line hampering the Valley Triple from operating. We decided to try the Mixing Bowl for a couple of runs to get the legs loosened up a bit. The liftline was huge and we finally noticed that they got the Bear Lift up and running so we headed over to try that. Again, huge lines and only the bottom of Lower Valley open due to the washout from Friday. The guns were blasting everywhere but the snow was probably coming down in Vermont somewhere. We went in for lunch and heard the midstation shuttle was finally open so decided to try that after eating. It was perhaps the most unendurable chair ride that I can remember in quite a long time, if ever, due to winds sustained at 35 to 40 MPH. We had a hard time keeping our eyes from freezing shut even in goggles. We finally got to midstation and headed down and found most of the trail setting up but great difficullty in determining where the edges of the groomed remnants of base left off and the new powder covering only rock and bare ground picked up. My daughter got literally blown over on her board resulting in two hard whiplashing falls that made us decide to call it quits and wait for more snow. It might have been better without the wind but we sure didn't want to dare another ride up to midstation in that environment for the extremely poor conditions. This outing came very close to contradicting the adage that a bad day of skiing is better than a good day at work. It also took a lot of p-tex life out of the base of my skis. I am sure there will be better reports in the future.