It had been more than a week, but last week’s virtually endless upslope snowfall finally came to a stop yesterday. However, another small system passed through the area last night. It wasn’t supposed to deliver much, but when I looked outside around 11:00 P.M. last night, we were getting a pounding of one-inch diameter flakes at the house. By this morning we’d actually picked up a couple of inches and the mountains in the Bolton–Stowe section of the Greens had received up to four inches, so we were in for another good coating of powder for the day’s skiing activities.
The morning’s outdoor adventures got started right on the ascent of the Bolton Valley access road. Once we got up to the big steep S-curve pitch at around 1,200’, we could see that traffic was stopped. It turned out that a couple of cars were struggling with the ascent. The road didn’t seem that bad from our perspective, but I later heard some comments suggesting that it wasn’t prepared as well as usual. In any event, the benefits of 4WD/AWD were obvious, not just for getting up the slick road, but having the ability to start right back up and get going from a dead stop on a steep slope. I met Stephen right in the parking lot as he was getting out of his car, and we made plans to meet up later.
While I was parking the car, the boys had warmed up on the Mighty Mite, and then I brought E and the boys right over to Wilderness based on my experiences from the previous day. I knew that the fresh snow and moderate pitch over there would be great for E to work on here Telemark turns off the groomed. In places that had seen some traffic, we found about 4 inches of new, but there were still spots that hadn’t been touched on Friday and had a good foot of powder. To check out the rest of the story and see the pictures, click through to the full report from today at Bolton Valley.