Northern Vermont wasn’t the focus of the weekend’s inverted trough system, but Bolton had reported a couple inches of new snow. We’d seen generally small flakes from the system at the house, but in the late morning when they started to get much larger, I figured it was time to head up to the mountain and see what was going on up there.
Getting into my bindings near the base of the Timberline Lift, I saw a snowboarder coming down the final pitch to the base, but more importantly I could also hear the sound of his board – generally not a good sign. Coverage didn’t look too bad on even the natural snow trails, but it was still just the combined coating put down by the midweek clipper and the weekend system. There were several inches of new snow, but closer inspection showed that there were still some bare spots under there, so it wasn’t surprising that the mountain was keeping most natural snow trails closed.
Off of the Timberline mid station the only real option was to head straight down Showtime, so that’s where I went for my first run. The base snow was manmade, and generally quite capable of holding an edge, but it was definitely not in the same class as the natural snow we’d been skiing over the holiday week. I checked off the edge of the trail to see what the natural snow situation was, and over the base I found generally 4 inches of powder in that 1,500’ to 2,250’ elevation range, with a few spots of 5 inches. That represented the sum of the fluff from the clipper and the latest denser synoptic snow from the inverted trough on top of it. All in all it was actually a fun run, and there were plenty of nice powder turns to be had along the edge of the trail. Click through to read the full report from today.