Loon Mountain - 3/17/2005

[Greg]

Date(s) Skied: Thursday, March 17, 2005

Resort or Ski Area: Loon Mountain, Lincoln, New Hampshire

Conditions: Packed powder, some scrape, bumps. Bluebird Day!

Trip Report: Finished up our trip with a bluebird day. We spent much of the day on bumps on Flume and Rumrunner. Both were very stiff early in the day, but softened up nicely after the sun hit them for a while. We also made some high-speed arcs on Walking Boss, Lower Flume, and Angel Street. We took a run early again on Speakeasy which with the bluebird skies today and the perfectly groomed packed powder ranks up there as probably my favorite cruiser. Super way to end four back to back days at Loon. Pics from today to follow.

Some thoughts on Loon from this week:

Triple Trouble: best run of the week. Charlie mentioned on Tuesday how he felt the choke point was much wider. He's right. I think they widened that section of the trail which is unfortunate. Still a great run and the most coverage I've ever seen on it. Very little scraping and mostly powdery bumps.

East Basin Double: Closed all week.

North Peak HSQ: Nice lift and a big improvement over the triple, at least mid-week. Some crowds formed on the right side of the lift. Lines were negligible if you came in from the left.

Kanc Quad: Basically ski right on all week. Maybe a 5 chair wait. I think the North Peak HSQ offloaded some traffic from the Kanc.

Gondola: reasonable mid-week wait times.

Rumrunner: Sweet bumps. Upper got roped off from time to time for race practice, but only for a few hours a day.

Sunset: No bumps. The moguls there last year were awesome, but I think with the new HSQ, there is a lot of intermediate traffic that would struggle if half of Sunset was allowed to bump up.

Mountain Club on Loon: Great place to stay. Very quiet hotel despite being full this week (Canadian ski club in town). The wireless internet is nice, but we were only able to access it from the room Sunday and Monday. The rest of the week I was able to log in from the main lobby.

Overall a great trip. The weather and snow was fantastic. It seemed more like mid-February this week than mid-March!

[Greg]

Pics are HERE.

[ski_resort_observer]

Nice pics....is spring really here. Nice view of the Whites.

The canucks, mostly from Ontario, pretty much take over most of the northern new england resorts this week..got 1,000 of them here at the Bush. They come every year at this time.

It's not the money maker you might think as most come with big ski clubs or ski travel groups and they get unreal discounted lodging, being midweek, and lift tix. They do, however, provide a nice midweek boost for the resort, valley's restaurants and other retail.