Today I was out for some lift-served skiing at Bolton Valley, and after touring for the last several ski sessions, it was actually the first time being back on the lifts since January 19th. Yesterday I decided to tour because of the temperatures, but today’s forecast suggested it would be warmer. Temperatures were definitely higher than they were yesterday, but it was still darned cold at elevation. Above 3,000’ it must have been only in the single digits F, and there was plenty of wind that made it a biting cold.
I decided take advantage of parking down at Timberline, with the intention of doing a big loop to the far end of the resort and back. My first ride on the Timberline Quad was with a group of mechanical engineering graduate students from Yale whose work is in robotics, so that was a fun conversation. One of them was also from Montana, so we were able to discuss all the ski areas out there. The temperatures felt quite comfortable down at those Timberline elevations (probably somewhere in the teens F), and there was no wind to speak of, but my next ride on the Vista Quad was frigid. So, there appeared to be quite a temperature gradient with respect to elevation, and the addition of those winds ahead of our next approaching winter system just multiplied the effect.
I’d actually planned to ride up the Wilderness Chair, but for some reason it wasn’t running. In any event, I was able to make my way over to the Wilderness terrain from Vista, and with the low traffic due to no direct lift service, the snow quality at Wilderness was excellent. There were certainly more tracks out there than when I’d visited on Friday, but you could tell that it was pretty much ski touring-level traffic vs. lift-served levels of traffic; the glades have plenty of fresh lines left in them. I finished out the day’s session with a ride up the Vista Quad and a hike up to The Knob, followed by assorted tree skiing in areas like the KP Glades and Corner Pocket Glades to get myself back to the Timberline Base.
With respect to the conditions I encountered, the headwall of Cobrass was really rough – it had the worst conditions I found on the day. The manmade snow was incredibly firm, and I had a hard time even getting turns in the usual strip of soft snow on the skier’s right that arises from skiers pushing the snow around. The skiers I saw in that top section of the trail during my run were often just sliding sideways and hanging on for dear life as they tried to get enough grip with their edges. It’s not as if we’ve had any sort of thaw in a long time, but that surface needs some serious work. It would do well with a good resurfacing storm or some major, deep grooming. I also skied Alta Vista though, and conditions there were much better. It still had manmade snow, but it was loose enough that plenty of snow had been pushed around and made available outside the center high traffic areas.
Thankfully, I was able to spend most of my time off piste, and as I’d hoped, the somewhat warmer temperatures and some natural settling and drying of the recent snows in last night’s very cold temperatures brought the quality of the powder up a couple of notches. In any untracked areas, there was a good couple feet of powder at all elevations – from above 3,000’ all the way down to 1,500’ at the base of Timberline. The powder is not yet super dry in the upper levels of the snowpack, but the right-side-up gradient is definitely reforming. I found that base depths were great at all elevations as well, so the past couple of weeks have really helped to get those lower Timberline elevations near midwinter form. The on-piste natural snow areas that were scoured by wind in January are still plagued by less than perfect coverage, but it looks like we’ve got a weather pattern with a series of somewhat moist systems coming through the area through about mid-month. So, as long as they don’t bring the kind of winds that many of the January systems did, those scoured areas may finally have a chance to acquire decent coverage.
