Bolton Valley, VT 08MAR2014

An image of Ty skiing powder in the Villager Trees area at Bolton Valley Resort in Vermont
There hasn’t been much fresh powder this week, but there’s still plenty out there.

As soon as I got back from my backcountry ski tour in the Monroe Trail area of Camel’s Hump, I checked in with Ty to see if he was still interested in heading up to Bolton Valley for some lift-served turns.  I grabbed my fat skis off the car’s ski rack, traded them for some mid fats, and as soon as Ty was dressed, we were off.  I was unsure how the trails were going to be, since we haven’t had much snow this week, but in any event it seemed like it would worth taking at least a couple of runs.

It was already after 4:00 P.M. when we started skiing, so I was expecting we’d have just the night skiing terrain to choose from, but that wasn’t the case.  The Cobrass suite of runs was all still open, so Ty and I headed that way and dropped into the Villager Trees.  Not surprisingly with little recent snow, the main lines were tracked, but traversing out got us into some decent powder.  There was still that crust under there, but the powder was often deep enough to keep you floating above it, even though we were only on mid fat skis.  We finished off down by Snowflake, so did a run through the Bonus Woods to get us back down to the bottom of the Vista Quad.  We explored around a lot in the Bonus Woods, finding mostly nice powder, although we’d occasionally encounter some crust and it made for comical results.  When we arrived at the top of Vista on our next run, it was approaching 6:00 P.M., but the sun was still out and patrol had not yet roped off the trails in the Cobrass area.  Seeing that, we took a run down Preacher and part of Devil’s Playground.  Ty and I talked about how when he was little, he was intimidated by the steeps in Devil’s Playground, but now he just attacks them like they’re nothing.  The snow in that general was OK, but we could definitely use another storm to freshen things up.  It actually sounds like we might have some systems of various types next week, so that would really get the March skiing rolling.

When we were done skiing, we stopped in and ordered up a couple of pies to go at Fireside Flatbread.  While we were in line to place our order, Ty was face to face with some of the pizzas behind the glass that were out for slices, and being a huge fan of their crust, he was really drooling over it.  I have to say, we were both quite hungry and it did look really good.  The guys were actually out of pizza boxes, so they actually created one for me out of some other box – and gave me the pizzas to go right on their pizza pans.  Hats off to the guys behind the counter for solving the issue, and we’ll have their pans back to them real soon!