Stowe, VT 15DEC2013

An image of snow on the roof of a shed with a snowgun in the background at Stowe Mountain Ski Resort in Vermont
All kinds of snow today at Stowe

Yesterday E had her training day for our school’s ski program at Stowe, and boy was it cold – it was below zero F for the entire morning.  I’d sent E off with plenty of hand and foot warmers, and she made use of them.  She actually cracked the lens in her goggles toward the end of the morning, but by then everyone was just about done anyway.  I don’t think there were many takers for afternoon turns once the requisite training items were covered in the morning.

Things were a little different for my training day today – temperatures were rising through the teens F, and oh yeah, there was a bit of a snowstorm in the intervening period.  This storm was one of those that comes out of the Ohio Valley and redevelops off the New England coast, and it brought up to 19 inches of new snow for the Vermont ski areas.  Snowfall totals were a bit lower for the Northern Vermont ski areas, generally approaching a foot, but as my snow analyses had shown, there was plenty of liquid equivalent in the snow; as of this morning, we’d picked up close to ¾ of an inch of liquid in the snow and the density was close to 10% H2O.  The snow was of course quite dry with the cold temperatures in the area, but it certainly wasn’t fluff that might be prone to blowing away.

“The snow depth at the Mt.
Mansfield Stake isn’t quite
to that 24” mark yet, but
people are definitely starting
to ski those areas of early
season trees.”

For today’s training session, Claire assigned me to the level eight group, and when the instructors were dividing up the trainees in that group, they further broke them up by those who had already skied five days or more, and those who hadn’t.  Although I’d yet to ride a ski lift this season, I’ve been out several times already, so I joined the former group, with Steve as our instructor.

“During today’s session,
Steve brought us into
Sunrise Glades, Birch
Glades, and Lower
Gulch Glades, and
they were all in
pretty good shape.”

With all the new snow, Steve’s plan for the day was to let us ski a lot.  Instead of working on drills, he wanted to work on group management (i.e., how do the coaches effectively manage their groups of students on the slopes) in between the skiing.  This was actually a nice change of pace, since E and I have had plenty of sessions with drills for both us and the students over the past few training sessions.  One new group management technique that I learned today was for brining the kids into new areas of trees.  What Steve likes to do is to show the students the entrance to the glade, but instead of entering that first time, he goes around to the exit of the glade via the trails.  That way, the students know what is in store, and are ready with a little more directional orientation for when they actually do ski the glade.  We talked a lot about strategies to use when bringing the kids into the trees, and it was a good fit for the trainees in our group, because many worked with the advanced students and were indeed doing a lot of off piste skiing.  Steve also worked on the partner strategy for ensuring that everyone is accounted for at each stop.  We actually had a real-time demonstration of its effectiveness, since my partner John had misheard our lift destination on one run and ended up at the Gondola instead of the Fourrunner Quad.  Since we knew he was missing, I was able to run over to the Gondola and retrieve him.

An image of Telemark skis with snow on them on a car ski rack at Stowe Mountain Ski Resort in Vermont
Grabbing the Tele boards for some afternoon turns

In terms of conditions, naturally they were best early on – we had a couple of great runs down Perry Merrill with good packed snow, and chowder and powder off to the edges.  It was nice that Steve just let us rip it up.  I generally found 12” of powder whenever I looked in undisturbed places, which is presumably the combination of snow from this storm and that frontal passage the other day.  The snow depth at the Mt. Mansfield Stake isn’t quite to that 24” mark yet (22” as of this evening’s report), but people are definitely starting to ski those appropriate areas of early season trees.  During today’s session, Steve brought us into Sunrise Glades, Birch Glades, and Lower Gulch Glades, and they were all in pretty good shape.  If you were going for lines of fresh powder, you wanted to be on your guard a bit since there are still some obstacles about, but in many spots it was hard to tell that it was so early in the season.  In areas that had seen skier traffic and had packed snow, you could just ski it and really didn’t have to worry about coverage issues.  In any event, it was definitely nice to be back in the trees.  Indeed those runs listed are the more moderately pitched, well maintained glades that are amenable to these earlier visits, but they’re very low on the mountain and that says a lot about the current state of the snowpack.

An image of the status board for the chain lifts at Stowe Mountain Ski Resort in VermontAfter some lunch and paperwork at the Great Room Grill, Steve said that we were done, but that anyone who wanted to could meet with him at 1:00 P.M. and work on identifying weaknesses in student’s ski technique and how to remedy the situation.  Having done a lot of that over the past few sessions, I decided I’d just grab a pair of my Tele skis from the car and take a final run or two before heading home.  I was just going to grab my mid fats and head back over toward the Chapel Glades, but then wondered if the Sensation Quad was open – if it wasn’t, it might be a nice place to earn some turns.  With that in mind, I grabbed the fat boards off the rack, finding everything covered in a layer of new snow that had fallen during the morning.  Once I checked in at the lift status board at the Spruce Peak Base, I saw that indeed the Sensation Quad was running.  That meant that the terrain over there on Spruce would likely be pretty packed out, but I decided to just go for it instead of making yet another trip back to the car.

I took a trip up the Sunny Spruce Quad and made my way over toward the base of Sensation.  There were actually very few people over in that area, but in terms of traffic, the damage had been done earlier in the day.  There were still pockets of powder off to the sides of trials, but with Main Street closed for snowmaking, terrain was limited.  Even the hiking terrain above the top of Sensation was tracked up, so people had clearly been doing what they could to get some powder with the limited acreage that’s currently available on Spruce Peak.  In spots where the snow surface was down to manmade snow, the fat skis were definitely a poor tool for the job.  I ended up just going with alpine turns in the areas where the snow was firm like that, because getting the fat skis on edge in a Telemark stance in those areas felt like trying to get a snowboard on edge on icy terrain.  They’re just not meant to do that well.  I will say that I notice the deficiencies of fat, rockered skis much less when I ski them alpine, so that may be one reason that so many people are willing to use them as more all around skis (or they just go in with the recent marketing trends and figure that’s the way it is).  With my legs cooked from the morning’s runs, I was very ready to call it a day after that trip to the bottom.  I really would have liked to venture over to the snowfields above Meadows for some powder, but they had that area roped off because of snowmaking below.  It was looking so good in there with the tracks from when it had been skied – hopefully I can get in there on my next Stowe powder day.