Bolton Valley, VT 16FEB2019

In the past 72 hours Mother Nature has dropped 25 inches of snow on Bolton Valley, and with the first part of that accumulation coming in quite dense, it’s been a great resurfacing of the slopes.  The bulk of the snow came from Winter Storm Maya during the early part of the week, and the last few inches came from a slightly warmer storm that hit the area yesterday.  That system brought freezing levels above the base elevations of the local resorts, so we were eager to see how that played out with respect to the quality of the snow surfaces.

“In the past 72 hours Mother Nature has dropped 25 inches of snow on Bolton Valley, and with the first part of that accumulation coming in quite dense, it’s been a great resurfacing of the slopes.”

We got to Timberline not long after the opening of the Timberline Quad, and encountered some briefly heavy snowfall that ended up sticking around in lighter intensity much of the morning to add a bit of freshening to the slopes.  Temperatures were forecast to be in the mid-20s F, but it certainly felt a bit colder than that with the snowfall and some wind.  We kicked off the day with an initial top-to-bottom run on Timberline to get a sense for how high the freezing line had gone yesterday, and the effects were definitely a gradient with respect to elevation.  There was no obvious sharp line to note, but above 2,000 the effects seemed to be fairly minimal.  Even below that elevation though, the mountain has seen several additional inches of accumulation, so there actually was great powder skiing all the way down to 1,500’.  The areas that created the most trouble in our experience were where grooming had kicked up some chunks of dense snow to create an irregular subsurface.

We headed over to the main mountain to take advantage of the additional elevation and catch some lunch after a bit more skiing.  We had a great run on White Rabbit and Snow Hole, and indeed the depths of powder and quality of the subsurface just kept getting better and better the higher you went.  We relaxed with a good lunch at the James Moore Tavern, and seemed to get in there just before it started getting busy.

After lunch we headed up The Crack, found a lot of nice powder in Maria’s, then worked our way back to Timberline.  We were still finding a lot of powder even at that point in the day, so we hung around for some additional Timberline runs, catching things like the Tattle Tale headwall, that was looking very steep and appealing to Dylan, and then some fun and games in the KP Glades where everyone seemed to get themselves covered in powder through various crashes or others purposely lacing them with the white stuff.

It is technically a holiday weekend, and while the resort was bustling, lift queues were almost nonexistent since the entire resort is open and everyone is well spread out.  We even got word from Stowe that while the free days on our passes were certainly working there, the resort was really busy due to the holiday, so people should be prepared for that.  Overall though, it’s just great that the resorts are getting such excellent conditions for a big holiday weekend and upcoming vacation week.