Ragged Mt 3/29/14

Ragged Mt 3/29/14

Great day at Ragged.
Snow was a bit on the wet side, but a quick wax job took care of that and really made the difference.
Soft conditions all over. Even the occassional ice patch on the groomers was on the soft side. The groomers skied really well.
Natural snow trails and glades skied well too. Snow was a bit slower on those.

Some of the galdes that did not see much traffic (Abyss, for instance) was a bit challenging because the unpacked snow was like white cement. The only way that I could turn in that was to just hop out of the snow and change direction then. The snow coverage in the wood was really good. Occassional rock or root here and there, but no big deal.

Rags to Riches was our favorite.

The best part were the moguls. Maaan, even I felt like a hero. Note of explanation: I love skiing moguls but often, I don't do it well, thus my screen name, mash up of two words, "bumps" and "nemesis" = bumpsis.
Anyway, I live for conditions like today. The snow was slow enough and soft in the between the moguls so I could take an agressive zipper line and stay in it until my quads screamed for mercy. It felt GREAT!

I was following my 14 year old son who's pretty good and with super stamina. Our favorite bump run was Sweepstakes. It had awesome lines and bump spacing was just perfect.
My boy actually might have preferred Reggae Glades but becuase the angle of that slope was too shallow and the bump spacing tighter, I still think that Sweepstakes had better bumps.

This was my second best bump skiing session of the season. The rating of # 1 has to go to skiing powder filled beauties on Bubblecuffer back in mid February at Sugarloaf.

The sky was partly sunny until about 1 PM or so and then it got a bit gray. No rain. We finally started seeing the wet ppt around Concord on our way back home to Boston.

I was really surprised tha the mountain was not crowded. The temps were in mid 40's, skiing was great.

I was at Ragged on March 25 and like Bumpsis, I had a terrific day.

Ragged has three major problems (some they are trying to address) that keep them from being discovered:
1. You can't get there from here! The roads to Ragged are pretty bad, so even though it is much closer to the greater Boston market than Waterville and Loon, it is only minutes closer as the roads go.
2. If one is looking for a multi-day vacation, there are very few beds within 20 miles
3. If one is looking for something to do after the ski day is over, there's not even a good restaurant (that I know of) within 20 miles.

That being said, I suggest that Ragged is probably the most underrated skiing mountain in NH. It is one of a very few ski areas in NH that has minimal lines, even on most weekends. I suggest also, that with their extensive glades and their multi-peak layout, that Ragged skis much bigger than its vertical would lead one to believe. It appears that this season they really got their snowmaking issues under control. True that they had lots of natural, but I'd never seen the kind of snow depth that were on their snowmaking trails.