Burke Mountain, East Burke VT 3/21/2015

I haven't been able to get out and do much "real" skiing this season after rupturing the Achilles tendon in my left leg in late September, but I've been slowly getting back on my skis since early February.  I started out with a couple runs down the bunny slope at Wachusett my first time out, but I'm now comfortably able to get in a decent afternoon of skiing, albeit on less challenging terrain than I'm used to.  But hey, I'm just happy that my whole season wasn't a wash, as my orthopedist told me it would be. I mean, what a winter to miss out on, eh??

Anyway, my SO and I have been visiting our usual haunts this winter; Berkshire East, Wachusett, and Wildcat, which I've already done trip reports for last year, but yesterday we finally decided to go up to Burke Mountain in East Burke, VT.  We met in East Burke many years ago mountain biking on the Kingdom Trails, have returned many times to mountain bike, but never bothered to go back up during the winter to ski.  Why?  I have no idea!!  

The drive up was exciting; we saw at least a half dozen scenes like this jackknifed truck until it finally cleared up a couple hours into our drive:



We finally arrived at Burke, bought our lift tickets from an extremely cheerful desk clerk, booted up, and headed out onto the slopes.  The mountain is laid out with a fairly mellow lower mountain, but the upper mountain steepens drastically.  We did a couple runs on the lower mountain trails to warm up.  There are a few glades on the lower mountain, and you're even able to ski parts of the downhill mountain bike trails.  I definitely want to go back to do that when I have my full leg strength back.  I can't even imagine how much fun Jester must be on skis, with is tabletops and berms, as it totally rocks on a bike!

Next we headed up to the summit and took our first run down Upper Willoughby, where we got these beautiful shots:



Willoughby Gap in the distance:



We turned right onto Upper Bear Dean and then crossed back over to Upper Willoughby.  Eammon said that this was definitely the steepest terrain he's skied so far on his new tele set up (he has snowboarded up until this year), but he handled it pretty well.  I did think it might be a touch steeper even than the blues we had skied a couple weekends ago at Wildcat.  The snow was absolutely perfect, as I'm sure it was at many ski resorts yesterday:  soft, very carveable hero snow! We did a second run from the summit down Toll Road to Mountain Marsh, but at that point my Achilles began to protest, and my calf kept threatening to ball up into a massive charlie horse, so we headed back down to the lower mountain to finish out our day.

We took a peak down some of the black diamonds and double black diamonds as we passed the entrances. It looked like super fun terrain.  There is still quite decent coverage, they were steep, and it looked like there are features to jump off if you like that sort of stuff.  The black diamonds we happened to see were ungroomed.  It looks like the glades between ski trails are open for skiing.  They were pretty well skied all over the mountain except where the trees got really thick and the terrain extremely steep.  

The vibe at Burke is friendly and laid back. The lift lines weren't too bad.  We had to wait maybe 5 minutes top at the mid-mountain lift, and there's barely any wait at the base. It's still a fairly old school place, although the new owner is building up new condos at the mid-lodge.  We didn't make it up into the newly renovated Bear Den lodge, but the band/entertainment schedule I saw looked fairly solid, and I've heard the food and beer is pretty good.  They have a stone patio with a fireplace outside where several people were gathered 'round the fire keeping warm apres ski.  We'll be back to ski it again.  Especially now with Kingdom Trails grooming all their singletrack for fatbiking, we can even bring our fatbikes with us, spend one day skiing and one day fatbiking!  There is also xc skiing and snowshoeing at KT, so there's something for everyone to do in East Burke.