Ski Sundown 2/22/2009

It was nuking at Sundown when I left at noon. I clicked in at 8:30 and skied NE > Ex bumps for the first hour. Conditions all over the mountain wear firm but very edgable. Once the rain/snow mix started things softened up a bit more. Gunny bumps are tightly spaced. The section they added to last night had an abundance of death cookies in the soon to be troughs. Its going to be a blast learning to ski those things. Today was a bit more challenging due to my rig.

I was on my old 156 length and 67 underfoot Heads. Compared to my Nordica Hot Rods these things are soft as butter... and not in a good way. My fore/aft balance was a mess. The only positive was being able to keep a much tighter stance. If I had the Nordicas today I would have stuck around for an other couple of hours.

Great to ski with severine and o3jeff. Good company.

I'm sure Greg will add much better detail on the conditions of the bumps.

Nice glad ya got out there!!! I bagged it for today.....Yes that is gonna be one sick run when the conditions get better!!

steveo

You should of stayed. The snow was wet and heavy and was skiing real slow, but it filled in the Ex bumps nicely and I was even able to do some top to bottom runs with some form by the end of the day. Gunbarrel bumps do need a lot of skiing in and they are pretty tight in there.

By 2 we were pretty soaked and called it a day. Saw Greg pulling in as I was leaving and there must of been some accident on the access road in since they were making everyone take a right out of the lot. Weather was pretty odd over there, had heavy snow on the mountain for hours and then once I got a few miles up route 44 it was just rain and no signs of snow.

Good times today! Got there about 9:15 or so, on the snow by 9:30AM. Skied two runs before I caught up with Jeff, who promptly showed me the Gunny bumps. Good luck to you guys! I was fine going down the middle (skier's left had a race course set up). I thought the snow on the groomers was pretty good even at the start of the day. Machine-groomed loose granular, though there was ice underneath. I know I said I don't ski in the rain, but I did today... and got soaked. By the time Jeff and I decided to call it quits, I was pretty cold, thanks to being thoroughly wet.

No jumps for me today. My knee was sore still from running hard on Friday. It's even sorer now. But it was fun just getting out there and the snow skied well up until the last couple of runs when it started to get grabby (slow-fast-slow). The Maries were a good choice, though I still wish I had tossed the Celebrities in the car for when it started to snow.

Nice skiing with you, Jeff and Grassi! Thanks for not heckling me into the bumps. I do have one or two pics but I haven't had a chance to upload them yet... will be coming.

i'm a bit confused now.

was it raining at sundown or snowing?

Im confused too....Greg said the snow was like glue.....JP called and said it was epic??

steveo

There was sleet/rain in the morning, which switched over to huge flakes of snow. That snow was wet and sticky - made for some grabbiness that really slowed ya down.

I was pretty soaked when I left at noon.

Forgot to mention that I crashed about 4 times in the Gunny bumps today. Controlling my speed is going to be my issue until I get a handle on things. Its going to be a leg burner when its completely seeded.

Pics that I took:




I wanted to take more but didn't want to hold the guys up. These are with my POS P&S... still waiting on some stuff before I bring the DSLR out. Hopefully I'll have that sorted out in time for the bump comp in 1 month!

Gunny Bumps!

Kind of a weird afternoon. Dumping the whole way there. Huge fat flakes, golf ball sized. At one point on the drive, the combination of the snow dumping and a contact lens that started wigging out resulted almost in a feeling of vertigo. Weird stuff. Anyway, got on to Ratlum Road and found it was closed due to a 5 car accident. Sat there for the better part of an hour waiting for the stupid road to open up. :roll:

Got going about 2:30. They picked up about 2-3" and that was the about all they were going to get. Snow was extremely tacky and slow. Kinda good for bump building though. I did a few runs and then stopped to chat with johnnypoach who was working as the starter for the NASTAR races. There was only a handful of people doing it so I jumped in a few times. On my first run I ended up on the wrong side of the gates. :lol: For my second two races, Shannon from the race crew lent me some nice 186 cm GS skis, freshly tuned. I gotta tell you, a ski that hooks up on edge like that is pretty fun.....and intimidating. Still I shaved 4 seconds off my times and scored a bronze both times. :flag:

It was then back to skiing in the bumps. The Gunny bumps start a bit down the trail. It's very easy to tell between the section that was partially skied in yesterday and the new stuff. The top skied pretty nicely actually. The new "bumps" are very rough. The field is probably about 30% of the way down the trail now. Still a long way to go and when that's done and skied, it's going to be a nuts run. The seeding is grade A perfect. Nice and tight and really symmetrical. Small cone like bumps now, but some consistent and long zippers are definitely going to result. Excellent stuff.

Anyway, I packed it in about 5:30. It started to dry out a bit the last hour or so. Here's a cheezy video, complete with lame hand-cam. It's almost useless being so foggy, but it might give you a feel for the length of the bumps as they are now, as well as how much further we have to go!



Not sure whether Brian is over there, but I don't envy him. The temps are crashing and the wind is roaring. Those tacky bumps are going to crunch up quick.

So far, so good though.

He left about 10 min ago. Was busy fixing my laptop and got a late start.

That vid is giving me vertigo. :lol:

The drive home sucked. We were routed the other way down Ratlum and coming down 219, people were driving like morons. Then again, a lot of them were stuck coming up the other way. I ditched the usual route and went over the reservoir toward People's State Forest and through Winsted instead. What a mess!

I actually had an enjoyable solo night tonight. I took my time getting over there after hearing that conditions were far from stellar. I wanted to get on snow by 8pm, but it ended up being 8:30 by the time I got my ass in gear. My expectations were low, especially with the strong winds and dropping temperatures on my drive over. When I pulled in and saw no more than 15 cars in the lot and an empty hill I started to question how good of an idea this was. While I was booting up it took a good 5 minutes before I saw anyone going up the lift, I was starting to think they closed early for the night. My hopes for a good session diminished even more when I got to the base area and found that I had to skate across an ice skating rink to get to the lifts.

My first run I headed right for Gunny, the flat section across the top wasn't much better than the bottom, with the access down to gunny being just slightly better. As I crested over the top of Gunny and saw the bumps for the first time I was greeted by some very strong wind gusts right in my face, I started to have doubts if I'd do more than one run. However, when I got to the top of the bumps and stopped on a mogul in the middle I was very happily surprised to find the snow very edge-able. I was able to blow the death cookies apart easily with my skis, things were starting to look up! Off I went for my first ever Gunny mogul turns. I was able to link together several turns for a short while until the line I was in kinda ended in a pile of groomer rubble. From there to the bottom of the bumps I did maintenance, side slipping and smashing the nuggets left behind by the groomers. That was actually kinda fun, in a weird way. The next run I wanted to try and get my legs going a little more so I headed towards Temptor for a somewhat sad run down in it's boring state. I then cut over to the Ex bumps, which are getting freaking huge! I couldn't believe how much bigger they had gotten. I felt really good through them, getting some good absorption on the bigger beasts, one of those runs where something seemed to click. After that I did another maintenance run down Gunny, then 2 or 3 runs to try and enjoy the fruits of my labor. Unfortunately I could never seem to find the lines I had worked on. I still had a blast though, making groups of several good turns before either blowing up or running into some funkiness. At this point it was getting late, but I thought I could get in two more runs so I headed back to one last run down Temptor to the the Ex bumps, which were just too much damn fun the first time to not hit again. Unfortunately that would prove to be my last run. I was hoping for one more down Gunny, I think I could have pieced together a line of sorts down through most of it by then, but I wasn't able to try.

I was definitely one of those guys that lifties love to hate on cold, windy nights like this. I had to be one of only 2 or 3 total customers on the hill for the last 30-40 minutes. There were a total of 4 cars in the lot when I got back to my car, some of those being employee cars.

All in all a good solid night, I'm glad I was able to make it, especially to ski the Gunny bumps in their baby state. I love seeing a bump field grow.

Glad it worked out well for you! (I think that's the best writing I've ever seen from you, too! )

Cool Brian. Glad you were able to squeak out a good session. Sometimes you never know which is why I usually try to force myself to ski if that's the initial plan. For me yesterday wasn't a ripper bump day, but it was just fun to see how the mogul field is shaping up.