Crotched Mountain, Francestown, NH 1/26

E. and I have been getting out to a new ski area in New England just about every weekend.  This past Sunday, we chose Crotched Mountain.  It’s a medium sized resort up in the middle of nowhere (and I mean *nowhere*) in southern NH, about a 90 minute drive from us.  It's comparable to Greek Peak and Wachusett, at 875' of vertical.  We weren't expecting anything too special, but we were lured up there because of reasonable half day ticket prices, and because they said that 100% of their terrain is open, including a few glades and an area labeled "natural" terrain off the backside of the summit on the trail map. We questioned that a bit, but thought perhaps they’d received some strange dumping of snow that missed other places in NH. Well, the glades were open, technically, but as we rode the chairlift up, we saw that unless we wanted to be replacing our skis/board sometime soon, we wouldn't want to try them on that day.  We were disappointed by that, but soon ran into a group of E.’s friends by coincidence, and hung with them for most of the afternoon.
 
The mountain was not very crowded, aside from the main thoroughfare (Moonwalk) that runs from the top of the mountain to the mid-point.  That was a plus in my mind.  They have a fairly new high speed quad (the Crotched Rocket) that gets you up to the summit pretty quickly.  They have a few black diamonds, some blues, but mostly greens.  We didn't think the mountain offered much in terms of terrain variety, but they had done a very nice job of snowmaking and grooming.  Some of the black diamonds were getting quite scrape-y by mid-afternoon, but the blues and greens held a nice covering of machine groomed packed powder that was easy to edge into quite well all day.  We got about a dozen or so runs in for the day, mostly on the black diamonds.  They do have four terrain parks, so it is quite appealing to kids and teenagers.  There were many families there.  There were a bunch of other tele skiers up there, so I thought that was cool.  Ultimately, though, I think the only reason I would go back is if I wanted to ski glades  and I didn't feeling like driving 2-3 hours to get to other resorts.  

Hey, and I have photos this time.  

View from the summit



Eammon riding down from the lift to Satellite



Coming down Moonwalk



Mother Nature sending some fresh snow our way, and I'm about to drop down to UFO from Moonwalk