We had another nice day of weather today with some sun and temperatures in the 50s F, so I headed up to Bolton Valley for another ski tour at Timberline. The strip of snow just to the climber’s right of the Timberline Quad base station that we used for skinning during our ski tour on Saturday, was slightly broken up now with a small gap. It was just a few feet of dry grass in the break though, so I easily continued right across it, and coverage was great from there on up.
On Saturday, we stopped our tour at the Timberline Mid Station because it was our first outing in a little while and I figured it was good to take it easy, but today I headed right up to the Timberline Summit. The views were nice with some late day clouds to the west over Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks. The snow on Showtime was even a notch better than Saturday, I think thanks to a bit more sun to soften it up and create a smoother, more even surface today.
It looks like we’ll have more spring weather in the first part of this week before it becomes wintrier in the latter part of the week.
Dude, the resorts are closed to all visitors. Uphill travel included. The chance of an experienced skier getting hurt is slim, but the hospitals are overwhelmed right now and you don’t want to be in one right now. Please get exercise and enjoy yourself, but stay off the resorts and participate in less dangerous activities.
The reason for recent restrictions on uphill travel at resorts hasn’t been due to safety, it’s been because of concerns about the ability to support adequate social distancing. For resorts that allow uphill travel, some have seen so much traffic with people coming from out of state (such as several hundred cars at Stowe on a weekend day at the end of March) that it was clearly counterproductive to social distancing during the pandemic. This only happened fairly recently (apparently April 4th) when resorts and communities finally decided that the numbers engaging in the activity were just too great. The situation is quite ironic in that that ski touring itself is probably one of the best exercise activities out there with respect to social distancing.