Jiminy Peak- 3/17/04- Night

[jimme]

Jiminy Peak 3-17-04 Night

Even arriving at about 7:00 I got to park in lot two! No buses! No crowds! About 4" in the lot. (?) Maybe they plowed overnight.

Looking up at Ace, I could see it was pretty tracked up, but that was expected since it was an ovenight snow. As I got near the lift I was still looking for the advertised 10", but it looked like half that much at best. Maybe the wind blew it to Boston or is it typical marketing BS?

No doubt there was powder all over the mountain and the wind was not bad. You could see soft mounds of snow on all visible trails on the chair ride. Even Upper Exhibition looked like it had been open which may have been a first this season. You could see the rope was down at the entrance off Upper Whirlaway and it looked skied pretty well.

Made my usual first run to Ace, and West Way was in it's finest shape. From the point adjacent to Azelea Path to Upper Fox it was all "moglets" of nice soft powder. Even the virtually flat "football field" section was fun to ski. It gave this portion of the trail some nice charater. Ace was tracked out, but was forming soft bumps on the left and the snow pack was excellent.

Whitetail was sweet- on the right with lots of powdery bumps. North Glade was just as nice, and Lower Glade as well. My powder stash from L. Glade onto Merry Go Round was as deep as last Friday and had only three to four sets of tracks. From the skiers right where M-G-R cuts over The Foxes, there were a half-dozen patrollers and as many "crossed skis" on Fox. I could see they were working in the woods. They flagged me past, so I did not rubber-neck. I went back to that point several runs later and could see where someone went down, and hopefully missed the trees. The fall area was not too tighly tree'd, but they would have had to clear a few during the fall.

Grand Slam and the right side of Ace has some "ice pebbles" mixed in with the fresh causing me to think some grooming happened overnight. This was more the exception though, and not found on all the trails.

All the open trails were in great shape with very little scraping. You'd hit a patch that was scraped off, but it was occational.

After skiing the open night trails, I'd say there was about 8" of fresh settled snow at mid mountain. It was snowing when I arrived, and ligtly snowing when I left. Front Row!

Jimme

[Greg]

Thanks for the report, jimme! I love reading your detailed Jiminy reports! Sounds like it was a fantastic night. I wish I lived close enough where I could just pop in for some night skiing there.

[jimme]

I'm realizing how fortunate I am! Understanding wife and boss at work that let me take the powder days. Wanna hear a funny story? I've lived about 45 min from Jiminy since 1981 during my non skiing years. Then I took a trip in '91(?), but didn't know the Rt 43 route from the Albany, NY area so I got on the NYS Thruway and headed to Mass., and somehow got to Jiminy. This took me over two hours!

A few years later. Well, maybe about 8 or 9, I was talking to a friend of a friend and he mentioned Jiminy was about 45 minutes from Troy, NY. I said "What! It takes about 2 hours!" and I explained my Thruway route. He shook his head and laughed. "Naw, you take 66 to Rt 43 through Stephentown and go right to Jiminy, I used to go all the time."

So one Feb afternoon in 1999, I took his route and duh, within 45 min I was at Jiminy renting skis, boots & poles and I haven't stopped skiing since. I did buy new gear, renting was getting expensive. The experience was somewhat of an epiphany. "Holy tihs! I've lived this close to a ski area for almost 20 years and didn't know it!"

Jimme