Harriman/ Bear Mountain/ Silvermine Conditions

Just starting this cause I wanted some place to drop some additional pics we didn’t use in the current blog post. Also, I promised the guy with the dog I’d post some more for him. He had a go-pro attached to his dog which came off at some point and, last I knew, he wasn’t able to find it so he lost his own pics.
Lake Tiorati




Silvermine

Unfortunately this is what it looks like now. Timing is important down here.

I’m on chauffer duty today but I didn’t have to be anywhere til 10 AM so I had time for some casual early morning turns. Microclimates are crazy. This is the northern Palisades Parkway this morning. At my house there no evidence of the snow at at all.



One ridge line to the west. Granted, it’s wet cement but it is snow.






Silvermine itself. Of course there’s always at least one guy ahead of me.






I recognized the jacket of the guy that was there ahead of me. I bumped into him here last year and remembered he was on some novel gear so, even though our laps were way out of sync, I waited a little while at the bottom to snap a couple pics before leaving. Basically old 90s era alpine skis with NNN bindings and boots.




Now if somebody can keep the temps some place near freezing and conjure up another storm in the next week, we’ll really be getting somewhere.

Bear Mountain in the distance

Was gonna do some XC laps at our town park but a few key spots already melted out so it was back to my standby baby-bc spot.



What I know about XC would fit in a thimble but I made do. The downhill portions made me feel like it was my first day on skis. That and the crust limited me to straightling  the downhill.



I crisscrossed back and forth up and down a few times, mainly to survey the snow cover. There were sledders and hikers and snow showers all over the main slope so I started way over to lookers right just to get away from the crowd. The skiing wasn’t great but I got my workout. I would say the place is finally set up for an epic day if next week’s storm turns out to be more then is currently projected. If they get a couple or six inches before any significant melt, it’ll really Ski nice. A little dawn patrol might be in order this week if we get lucky.

The little group on the left in this pic were some other skiers skinning up the “expert” slope. I saw 5 other skiers and a snowboarder while I was there. More then ever before.






Never noticed these before- a couple old snowmaking guns mounted up in the trees.