End of March

Day of rest tomorrow?

Looking forward to going to work tomorrow so I can recover for a day. 4 days of skiing. 3 full days of downhill and one 1/2 day of x-country.
2 powder days and now more Spring like at lower altitude and snow that has not been above freezing up higher. We needed many feet of snow to make things right again and we got it.
Hard to leave the mountain in these conditions but your knees and legs argue differently. Plus they stop the lifts at 4:00!
Today was blue sky without a cloud in the sky all day. Clear views of Mt Washington from the top of Madonna. Almost no wind with temps ranging from 10 in the AM to 40 in the afternoon.

Hard to stop and take any pictures with skiing as good as it is. Didn't take any today but the few below are Friday:

Storm!

One extreme to the other! It snowed 2.5 feet in the valley. Today I went to Smuggs and they got about 4 feet. It probably snowed 3+ feet in the initial storm and then last night they got another 6-12 inches depending on altitude. The good news is it stays cold for a while so the snow should stay.
Waste deep powder in the woods. No kidding. It was cold, maybe 10 at altitude and 20 in the valley during the storm so it is nice powder. The trails this AM had good untracked powder from the snow the night before. Still skiing powder on my last run in the woods at 3PM.
Amazing!!

Not a ghost. Skier heading through the powder.

Don't try and go up hill!

And back in the "city" skiing at Shelburne Farms:

Mid March

Back to cold with very little snow. Mad River ski area was closed this week and will remain closed until we get some significant snow. Mad River is always a good indicator of what the natural snow is like. Not good in this case. Been going for walks locally:

Bad Skiing

I knew it would be terrible but I was bored. I went to Bolton after work for a x-country ski tour. Went up to Stowe view and toured around at higher elevations for a while. Sometimes there was 2 inches of snow on top of the hard pack that you could turn on. Sometimes it was just hard pack and sometimes just dangerous. Lots of sticks and assorted tree parts since it had been windy lately and also since many feet of snow had melted, exposing a lot of branches from earlier in the season. I thought I better go down the downhill trails since getting down from the Stowe view area in these conditions would be ugly. On Sun and Mon there is no night skiing at Bolton so when I came out of the woods at around 4:30 I had the mountain to myself. I had the woods to myself also. I didn't see one other skier the whole time I was out. I was expecting at least one other crazy person would be out there. The groomers were OK going down. Having x-country skis on made it marginally interesting.
Was it better than sitting on the couch? Of course it was.
Could it get worse? It probably will. More rain and warm weather short term followed by more cold with no snow in the forecast.
Will I go again? Yes. The real question is how bad can it be?

Going down the groomers

Good snow for a short section

Ice and rocks. I like skiing rocks better than ice.

Stowe view

Camels hump seen from woods

Snow reset

Amazing how much things have changed in the last week. I followed the Catamount trail up Honey Hollow and then bushwacked up to the Challenge Trail. I had been there 10 days ago and it was great skiing. Now it had about 2 inches of snow on top of the ground. The good news is there wasn't much ice since it appears it melted down to the ground before the 2 inches fell. Total reset on skiing. Oh well. Nice blue sky day and not much wind so the 10 degree temp felt OK. Followed the Challenge Trail back to Lions Ridge and then down that way to Honey Hollow parking.

Challenge Trail - lost 4 feet of snow from 2 weeks ago.

Too thin to ski

Rivers flowing but a lot of ice and cool green color