Tag: Hard Luck Lane

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Bolton Valley, VT 07DEC2024

An image showing a heavy coating of snow on the Ski Patrol Station at the top of the Vista Quad Chairlift at Bolton Valley Ski Resort in Vermont
An image of snow curling off the roof of the Inn in the Village after several rounds of snow have affected Bolton Valley Resort in Vermont
Snow curling off the roof of the Inn at Bolton Valley after many rounds of snow have hit the resort in the past week

It’s that time of year, and Bolton Valley started their lift-served ski season yesterday, so I headed up this afternoon for a few runs off the lifts to check out the conditions and get some exercise. It’s becoming a bit hard to keep track of the snow that’s falling because it’s nearly continuous with all these bread-and-butter systems passing through the area, but the resort is reporting 14 inches of new snow in the past 48 hours.

They have a very interesting assortment of lifts and trails available right now that is atypical of what they usually have going at the start of the season. The Snowflake Chair isn’t running, and Sherman’s Pass isn’t open, and those are often early season staples. Instead, the Wilderness Chair is running, and they appear to have the entirety of the Wilderness terrain open on natural snow. With neither Sherman’s Pass nor Bear Run open, there’s no beginner terrain currently being served off the Vista Quad or the Mid Mountain Chair, so the only beginner terrain is off the Mighty Mite. On top of that, the only way down from the Vista Summit is Hard Luck, which is a steep black diamond run. It is indeed a very unusual collection of early season terrain.

I decided to sample all the lifts that were available during my session, and I started with a Beech Seal run off the Mid Mountain Chair. The skier’s left side had manmade snow, and the skier’s right was natural snow, and the quality of the ski surfaces was of course night and day. The right side was a little thin in a few spots, but the snow quality was excellent since it’s entirely natural snow that has never undergone a thaw-freeze cycle. I next headed to the Vista Quad, and conditions on Hard Luck were disastrous. Coverage was fantastic, but being all manmade snow, very steep, and the only way down from Vista such that it got all the skier traffic, the quality of the snow was horrible. I’m sure racers would love it, but that’s about it. I watched multiple people try to turn and simply kick out, fall, and begin to slide down the slope because there’s just nothing to hold onto with your skis. Thankfully, about halfway down you can cut over to the Show Off trail, which is currently all natural snow. The coverage is a little thin in spots, but easily manageable and all the snow there was excellent packed powder.

An image of cars covered in fresh snow in early December thanks to numerous winter storms passing through Northern New England and affecting Bolton Valley Ski Resort in Vermont
Every time I pop up to the mountain there’s another plentiful round of snow covering everything thanks to the series of winter storms we’ve been seeing over the past week.

There was lots of snowmaking going on with temperatures in the 20s F, so I’m sure they’ll be opening more of the traditional early season terrain soon.

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Bolton Valley, VT 30DEC2021

An image of Erica skiing the Hard Luck trail during the Christmas holiday week at Bolton Valley Resort in Vermont
An image of the Courtside Condominiums in winter at Bolton Valley Ski Resort in Vermont
A view of snow clinging to the roof areas of the Courtside 1 Condos in the Bolton Valley Village during today’s ski outing

The Vista Quad was down for a time yesterday to take care of a mechanical issue, and during that time the Bolton Valley Base Area Webcam showed backups in the queues at the Mid Mountain and Snowflake lifts as one would expect with the number of holiday visitors.  The repairs were completed yesterday afternoon, which helped disperse everyone, and with everything starting out as expected this morning, E and I headed up to the mountain for a morning ski session.

I was excited to check out Hard Luck, which the mountain has recently opened as their first full black diamond offering of the season.  The snow report indicated that they’re still working to put sufficient snow down on Spillway, so that’s not quite open yet, but Hard Luck is definitely a favorite because it’s much more protected from the wind and often has better snow.

It was great be back on the Vista Quad for lift-served skiing, and we warmed up with a run on Sherman’s Pass and Bear Run to get a feel for the conditions.  Weather conditions have been relatively stable, and although we’ve only had small systems hitting the area over the past week, there haven’t been any major warm air intrusions to really deteriorate the snow surfaces.  With fresh grooming to start off the day, the groomed conditions were quite good on the low to moderate angle terrain we encountered on that run.  You could still hit firm snow in spots, but the lower angle terrain was definitely staying true to form maintaining a nice surface.

Once we were warmed up we headed for some steeper turns, and started on Hard Luck Lane.  E and I had a good discussion about how it’s typically quite icy because it’s steep, and gets a lot of traffic as the first option for many folks coming off Vista.  Today it offered up probably my favorite turns of the day on the left side where people had pushed a lot of extra snow.  Hard Luck was also quite nice throughout, but especially the edges where additional snow had either accumulated or remained untouched.  As we skied a spine on the left side of the trail, I was a bit jealous of E on alpine skis because she could hold a really tight line to stay in the best snow, whereas my footprint with Tele turns was a bit larger.  It was hard to go wrong though – the snow was generally nice all around on Hard Luck.

Looking forward, we might have a storm coming this weekend to potentially freshen up surfaces and perhaps open more terrain depending on how much liquid equivalent it brings.