Bolton Valley, VT 03JAN2021

An image of Dylan Telemark skiing in powder from Winter Storm John at Bolton Valley Resort in Vermont
An image of Dylan Telemark skiing in powder from Winter Storm John while ski touring in the Wilderness area at Bolton Valley Resort in Vermont
Dylan in a little powder during today’s tour as he tests out his Rossignol Soul 7 HD skis for the first time. The powder from Winter Storm John is getting harder to find with lots of people touring at Wilderness, but the snow is holding up well on low and moderate-angle terrain.

Yesterday delivered some decent lift-served turns, as well as a quick Wilderness tour with some powder, so today I headed back up to the mountain for a ski tour with Dylan.  With more time than I’d had yesterday afternoon, we went a bit farther afield in the Wilderness area in search of untracked powder.  The untouched snow was definitely harder to come by this afternoon, because there has been heavy ski touring traffic this weekend.  The amount of traffic is relative of course, and nothing like you’d get with lift-served skiing, but after an entire holiday weekend worth of people touring, the untracked snow on the trails of Wilderness had been just about picked clean.  One factor in the apparently heavy traffic is that folks aren’t yet using all the acreage of tree skiing; the trees were generally untouched because people know that it’s still just a bit too thin in there for the skiing to be practical.  I saw an occasional track of people who had headed into the trees, but you could tell they weren’t quite ready.  If we get one more good snowstorm with an inch of liquid, then the low-angle trees will be in play.

An image of Dylan Telemark skiing in powder from Winter Storm John at Bolton Valley Resort in Vermont
Although the trails in Bolton’s Wilderness area have seen a lot of skiers due to extensive use of their uphill route, Dylan and I were still able to get into some very nice powder from Winter Storm John on our tour today.

We picked up some take-out from Fireside Flatbread for the first time this season, and the process is similar to what the resort is doing at the Village Deli and The Mad Taco – they’re not taking orders in person.  In this case it looks like the preferred method is to go through the Toast online ordering service.  I actually found this approach to be quite quick though; I was easily able to put in my order on my phone, and they accept Apple Pay, so all I had to do was authorize that with my fingerprint, and we were good to go!

The weather looks generally quiet this coming week, but by the early to middle part of next week we could get back into a more typical Northern Greens bread-and-butter pattern of modest systems to freshen up the slopes.  We still need a solid synoptic storm with an inch of liquid equivalent (or something similar from a series of smaller systems) to really get the base depths to more respectable levels, but Winter Storm John was a godsend to at least get a bit of base down and have some snow to see us through the next week.

Bolton Valley, VT 02JAN2021 (A.M.)

An image of the Mid Mountain Double Chair disappearing into the clouds on a snowy morning at Bolton Valley Ski Resort in Vermont
An image of snow falling from Winter Storm John in the Village area at Bolton Valley Ski Resort in Vermont
There was quite the wintry vibe at Bolton Valley this morning as snow continued from Winter Storm John.

With the influx of snow that the area has seen from Winter Storm John since yesterday, the snow conditions improved dramatically this weekend.  Based on the liquid equivalent we picked up here at the house, I bet the local mountains picked up something in the range of ¾” of liquid, which is a game-changer relative to where things were before.

On Saturday morning I decided to go for my first lift-served turns of the season at Bolton Valley.  Only the main mountain is open at this point, since coverage is still too thin down at the lower elevations of Timberline.  It was snowing steadily with some big flakes when I arrived at the mountain, and I found about 4 to 5 inches of new accumulation in the Village areas at 2,000’.  The snowfall tapered off to light snow during the midmorning period, but really picked up to some heavy inch/hr snowfall when I was leaving a bit before noon.  That was when the back side of the storm was coming through, and the wind jumped up a bit there, but prior to that the weather was fantastic with temperatures just a bit below freezing and no wind.  There was obviously some surface snow in place from previous systems because I was generally finding powder depths of 6-9” at the 2,400’ level.  Skiing was good, with enough snow to resurface low to moderate angle slopes, and listening to skiers and riders on that terrain you’d hear absolutely nothing.  On higher angle slopes you could still hear contact with the old base snow, so it was obvious that ¾” of liquid can only do so much with holiday levels of skier traffic.

The conditions had seen such an uptick relative to where they’ve been the past week that I had to head back up for a tour on Wilderness in the afternoon!

An image of some condominiums with snow falling from Winter Storm John at Bolton Valley Ski Resort in Vermont
Another shot of the snow falling from Winter Storm John this morning when I was up in the Village area at Bolton Valley.