Ty was off from work today, so the two of us decided to head up to Bolton Valley for some turns. With the generally unconsolidated snowpack, it was a bit tough to tell how much new snow fell from this most recent Clipper system, but based on the resort’s snow report, it seemed like they picked up a few inches, similar to what we received down here in the valley.
With tomorrow being their opening day, there was a lot of activity on the mountain today as they made final preparations for opening. At the base, one of the patrollers asked if we could stay off Wilderness for touring and instead head over to the Nordic and backcountry network, so we were happy to oblige. Although there’s no snowmaking on Wilderness, there snowpack is substantial enough that they could open the area for lift-served skiing if they wanted to. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were doing some grooming and prep work/obstacle marking over there today, so I suspect they wanted to minimize skier traffic as much as they could.
I wouldn’t normally have defaulted to touring on the Nordic and backcountry Network at this stage of the early snowpack, since the Wilderness trails are just a safer bet for quality turns; they have been mowed and have a more substantiated base due to some skier traffic packing it down. But since I’ve been out on Wilderness for a few ski tours now this season, getting out onto the nearby backcountry terrain gave me a nice opportunity to compare the quality of the turns in both places. Although we made our ascent on the Nordic and backcountry Network terrain, we were actually touring in the area over near Snow Hole and made most of our descent on the edge of the on piste Wilderness terrain. That allowed us to directly experience the skiing in both areas today.
For overall skiing and powder turns, the experience was unquestionably better on piste at Wilderness. It’s not an issue of overall snow depth on the backcountry terrain; snowpack depths were closing in on 20 inches when I was out for my ski tour on Tuesday, and that was before the Clipper and the cold front brought a lot more snow to the area over the past couple of days. The depth of the snowpack has gone up substantially at this point – as of today the depth at the Mt. Mansfield stake is at 30 inches. What’s needed off piste to really improve the quality of the skiing is some consolidation. There is some base snow in the snowpack below the fluff, and it’s a decent base for on piste turns, it’s just not enough to sufficiently cover the contours of your typical off-piste terrain yet. Although a storm with above-freezing temperatures isn’t going to be great for snow quality, it would help in that consolidation. Alternatively, a nice dense snowfall storm would also help, and of course that would be much better for snow surfaces in general. It would temporarily ruin the current dry powder and might give us a bit of an upside-down snowpack, but it would really help set things up long term. The only other alternative would be to continue to get the type of dry snow we’re getting and wait a while for settling over time as the lower layers get compressed. This just takes a lot longer and requires a lot of snow, going the route of a continental/Colorado type snowpack.
From our experience touring today, it’s not that the off-piste skiing is horrible, it’s just that you need to stick to places that have seen a bit of skier traffic, or you know are well manicured with minimal hazards underfoot.
