Sugarbush Conditions

Sugarbush was soft and springlike on Spring Fling, Hotshot, waterfall, Sleeper, and Snowball yesterday. Castle Rock was “horrible, don’t go there” per my friends who checked it out. They said the moguls were frozen solid and the troughs of the moguls had rocks and dirt and sticks in them. Birch run and the glade trail that runs into Organ Grinder were frozen solid and very rough and loud in spots. The rest of the mountain was basically closed Due to wind holds.

NYSnowflake wrote

They said the moguls were frozen solid and the troughs of the moguls had rocks and dirt and sticks in them.

See that's some quality conditions reporting right there.  Probably can't afford a horse on the pay, but I think you'd rock it.

Thanks Snowflake, that's pretty much what I expected.  Castlerock is only great when there's a nice dump.  

I hope the winds die down starting tomorrow, I despise wind-holds.    

Sugar was decent today.  More sun then expected early, so the lower mountain was mush quickly.  Above 2500 ft the snow was firmer and easier to carve.  I should have started the day on Ellen instead of ending it there, but in all it was a good day.  

Skied Mt Ellen at Sugarbush for the first time in many years yesterday. Conditions were decent given the recent weather a little morning sun and temps in the 30's softened everything below mid-station by lunch. Snow cover was generally good on man-made trails but the natural trails are close to done.  In the morning and higher up you had to stick to groomed trails, one disappointment is that as far as we could tell none of the expert trails on Mt Ellen get groomed all were bumps which were rock hard given the warm weather earlier in the week. We did find one bump run, Encore, lower down that softened up nicely. Maybe because we normally ski Gore i am used to lots of groomed black diamonds

One other item of note is that the mountain ski report recommended skiing Inverness as it would soften first since it faces south. So went over there and found that race training was going on the 2 trails there and the only option was a traverse that took one over to the Northridge chair. About an hour later all the gates were gone and we saw folks skiing the main trails so we went over there, oddly there was a rope across the 2 trails that everyone was ducking under as we did,  the trails were great. On our second run someone was stopping everyone in the middle of the trail and telling it was for closed to the public, no idea why it had the best snow in the morning.

Similar to other major race programs GMVS pays for the snow making and lift in that pod.  If it’s soft they don’t want a lot of free skiing chewing up their carefully prepped snow. If they get bumps formed it will be harder to keep their snow in good race condition

I noticed that they don’t groom those nice bump runs when I was there a couple weeks ago and wait for them to thaw out