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Date(s) Skied: Friday, 2/23/2007, 8:30 am - 4:00 pm
Resort or Ski Area: Berkshire East, Charlemont, Massachusetts
Conditions: Powder, Crud, Natural snow, some areas of thin cover (some areas of no cover...), Temps in the 20's, Mostly sunny am, Mostly cloudy pm, Breezy.
Trip Report: Tough to believe that we could have a better day than we did last Friday at Magic, but we did! Berkshire East needs to be skied with some natural snow to truly enjoy its offerings. Today we had plenty of it.
Met up with bvibert, Grassi21, and ALLSKIING in the commuter lot in my town at 6 am. We made it to Berkshire East around 8:15 and had plenty of time to leisurely boot up, grab our lift tickets and still be in line before the chair started loading. We got about the 8th and 9th chairs and didn't quite score first tracks down Liftline, but there was still plenty of untracked for Brian, Dave and me. The mountain picked up about 5" and it was clear from this first run that the day would totally rock.
We spent the morning hitting Liftline, Minnie Dole, UMASS, Jug, East Glades, Flying Cloud, and Dave and I even did a recon to the Beast! We also met up with Jeremy Clark, Beast marketing guy, and took a few runs with him. After a quick lunch shortly after 11 am, we headed back out. Dave and Chris called it around 3 pm and Brian and I skied right up until 4 pm. Today was my best day this season. I skied strong and aggressively all day and felt great and full of energy. Sweet day for sure. I think I did a solid job showing the guys around. Trail breakdown:
Liftline: More than adequate cover. Ton of fun and we hit it many times including dropping in right from the summit shack. Good snow to be found all day, with some dirt, ice and other junk poking through. It really skied great all day though. Chris hit it from the traverse from the bottom.
Flying Cloud: Good snowmaking base with bumps and powder under the double. The lower section was all natural with more small bumps with some dirt troughs.
Jug: Classic natural trail. Got progressively thinner throughout the day, but it held up well all day. Soft bumps and crud. I love this trail!
East Glades: I took Brian and Dave into this tree run from the top. I thought they were both gonna kill me. Took a while to find the top section which basically had no snow at all as it all blew of. We basically just traversed it in an effort to minimize base damage. We all navigated down fine and the lower section skied great. Plenty of snow.
UMASS: Steep snowmaking run. Great cover early. Some scrape and blown off snow at the top later in the day.
Blizzard Island: Sweet cover. Great intermediate glade that Chris seemed to really enjoy.
BEAST: We ducked the rope to go Beast hunting. :blink: This run looks like it can be awesome with the right conditions, but today was not the day. Very thin at the top, a bit better in the middle, and actually pretty good for the final chute at the bottom. I thought Dave was gonna kill me again on this one.
Not a great run, but worth scoping out for better days. Super steep semi-gladed trail. No joke at all and hardest run in SNE, bar none.
Grizzly: A patroller noticed us scoping Grizzly while he was farting around with a "Closed" sign. He finally called over, "You can ski it if you want, but it's ugly." He skied around via UMASS and waited for us at the bottom. After hitting it, I skied over to him and said, "Your definition of 'ugly' is far different than mine." :lol: Cool that he let us hit it and made sure we all made it down. Mostly powder for me the entire run!
We also skied many of the natural intermediate trails which was also fun. The 5" of snow skied like more than that. Beast also skis bigger than its 1,180' vert would suggest. The snow quality today was perfect. We expected heavy dense snow; we got fluff. Awesome skiing today!
Anyway, I hope I did the mountain justice and did a good job showing the guys around. Brian and Chris had one day there each, and Dave had never been. Great company today and it was cool to see all of us push our limits a bit today. Got a bunch of video, as did Brian and Dave. I'll get something put together soon. Not counting lunch, 7.5 hours of hard skiing today and I'm shot. Dave gets the dedication award for leaving his house at 3:15 am to make the meet-up in time. Nice job, Dave! :beer:
Thanks guys!
Resort or Ski Area: Berkshire East, Charlemont, Massachusetts
Conditions: Powder, Crud, Natural snow, some areas of thin cover (some areas of no cover...), Temps in the 20's, Mostly sunny am, Mostly cloudy pm, Breezy.
Trip Report: Tough to believe that we could have a better day than we did last Friday at Magic, but we did! Berkshire East needs to be skied with some natural snow to truly enjoy its offerings. Today we had plenty of it.
Met up with bvibert, Grassi21, and ALLSKIING in the commuter lot in my town at 6 am. We made it to Berkshire East around 8:15 and had plenty of time to leisurely boot up, grab our lift tickets and still be in line before the chair started loading. We got about the 8th and 9th chairs and didn't quite score first tracks down Liftline, but there was still plenty of untracked for Brian, Dave and me. The mountain picked up about 5" and it was clear from this first run that the day would totally rock.
We spent the morning hitting Liftline, Minnie Dole, UMASS, Jug, East Glades, Flying Cloud, and Dave and I even did a recon to the Beast! We also met up with Jeremy Clark, Beast marketing guy, and took a few runs with him. After a quick lunch shortly after 11 am, we headed back out. Dave and Chris called it around 3 pm and Brian and I skied right up until 4 pm. Today was my best day this season. I skied strong and aggressively all day and felt great and full of energy. Sweet day for sure. I think I did a solid job showing the guys around. Trail breakdown:
Liftline: More than adequate cover. Ton of fun and we hit it many times including dropping in right from the summit shack. Good snow to be found all day, with some dirt, ice and other junk poking through. It really skied great all day though. Chris hit it from the traverse from the bottom.
Flying Cloud: Good snowmaking base with bumps and powder under the double. The lower section was all natural with more small bumps with some dirt troughs.
Jug: Classic natural trail. Got progressively thinner throughout the day, but it held up well all day. Soft bumps and crud. I love this trail!
East Glades: I took Brian and Dave into this tree run from the top. I thought they were both gonna kill me. Took a while to find the top section which basically had no snow at all as it all blew of. We basically just traversed it in an effort to minimize base damage. We all navigated down fine and the lower section skied great. Plenty of snow.
UMASS: Steep snowmaking run. Great cover early. Some scrape and blown off snow at the top later in the day.
Blizzard Island: Sweet cover. Great intermediate glade that Chris seemed to really enjoy.
BEAST: We ducked the rope to go Beast hunting. :blink: This run looks like it can be awesome with the right conditions, but today was not the day. Very thin at the top, a bit better in the middle, and actually pretty good for the final chute at the bottom. I thought Dave was gonna kill me again on this one.
Not a great run, but worth scoping out for better days. Super steep semi-gladed trail. No joke at all and hardest run in SNE, bar none.Grizzly: A patroller noticed us scoping Grizzly while he was farting around with a "Closed" sign. He finally called over, "You can ski it if you want, but it's ugly." He skied around via UMASS and waited for us at the bottom. After hitting it, I skied over to him and said, "Your definition of 'ugly' is far different than mine." :lol: Cool that he let us hit it and made sure we all made it down. Mostly powder for me the entire run!
We also skied many of the natural intermediate trails which was also fun. The 5" of snow skied like more than that. Beast also skis bigger than its 1,180' vert would suggest. The snow quality today was perfect. We expected heavy dense snow; we got fluff. Awesome skiing today!
Anyway, I hope I did the mountain justice and did a good job showing the guys around. Brian and Chris had one day there each, and Dave had never been. Great company today and it was cool to see all of us push our limits a bit today. Got a bunch of video, as did Brian and Dave. I'll get something put together soon. Not counting lunch, 7.5 hours of hard skiing today and I'm shot. Dave gets the dedication award for leaving his house at 3:15 am to make the meet-up in time. Nice job, Dave! :beer:
Thanks guys!
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