bdfreetuna
New member
Made it to Sutton no problems. First long trip in the Legacy GT, this vehicle is a blast to take on the highway. Such effortless and authoritative passes, and the swoosh of turbo accompanying each shift. Canadian border patrol was a nice lady.
Never been to Sutton. Great mountain but we could have picked a better day. It's a nice long ridge and the easier stuff is on the right and the harder stuff is in the middle or left. There's a lot of chairs but it only takes 3 chairs to get all the way from right (main lodge) to left (farthest and generally steeper area), and you can ski back from there without chairs.
So the lady selling tickets said she was warning everybody the trails were firm. I said okay, cool. Well, they were firm. And I don't sharpen my skis very often as they're absolute rock ski status as of about 2 years ago, with major damage all around including massive scratches, all kinds of big scrapes on the p-tex, parts of the top layer coming off, a weird bump where my ski must have bent too much in the p-tex, not to mention one of my ski brakes is now busted (not looking forward to having to chase that ski). The upside is I don't worry about shredding sticks, dirt, etc. I still avoid rocks but that's more of a safety thing.
Like I was saying my edges are shit. But I managed to find sides of trails and it was a good day to practice skiing dust on crust conditions.
Bump runs were generally better as long as we avoided the glare ice that was scattered around. Not that coverage was bad at all, there is plenty of snow there. It's just pretty frozen right now.
Better snow was generally in the woods but even the best case scenario was firm packed powder. So that's what we aimed for.
One trail called "Attraction" started off a decent firm mogul run and then ended with a very steep ice sheet. I wasn't paying great attention and somehow managed to traverse the entire ice sheet (once I realized what I was skiing over and how steep it was I attempted to not move a muscle and rather than not make it across the ice sheet, instead collide into the edge of the trail). So I did collide into the edge, which had about half a ski length of barely-any-snow and the rear of my skis were still on this very steep ice sheet. So the back of me starts sliding. I did manage to fortunately dig in hard and come to a stop quickly. "DO NOT COME THIS WAY" I yelled to Patricia.
We both end up sliding down 30 feet or so on the trails edge, using our butts of course, until we reached a skiable surface. Could have been worse.
After that we noticed that they were doing free demos. So we figured let's try some skis with fresh edges. I tried some Rossignol Super 7s (or something, they looked like decent hard pack skis). They were pretty good on the bumps but I would have preferred my skis with sharp edges.
We pretty much explored the whole mountain although there were some things we didn't ski that we definitely would have with better snow. Somehow we found that the double diamonds and woods were the most enjoyable because they were hard packed but not skied off, and the ice was more obvious. I don't like sneaky ice, and I really suck at skiing sneaky ice. Stuff makes me nervous.
Would definitely return with better snow, although it is a bit of a long haul.
So next day was Jay Peak, and we had high hopes for more and better snow there. Somehow crossing back into America was much more scutinized, with many questions and searching my trunk. I don't think the patrol guy is a skier. Staying in Sutton 2 nights to ski Sutton and Jay didn't make sense to him at all.
We got to Jay very early so I was optimistic I'd get to give Patricia a good tour of the hill, being her first time.
Jay basically had more and better snow, it was packed powder in the woods and groomed on trails. Some trails had ice like CanAm which was a mess, but we didn't try to ski stuff that looked like crap. High traffic trails got skied off by the end of the day but we had a great time with the following (I'll try to do in order at least ones I remember doing on purpose)..
Goat Run > Vertigo > Buckaroo Bonzai
Canyonland > Hell's Crossing > over to Jet area
Timbuktu
Kitz Woods > Angel's Wiggle
Ullr's Dream (had skied off parts) > Beaver Pond Glades > Kokomo
Everglade
Valhalla
I think we ended up doing maybe twice as many runs including some traversing but those were the highlights. All good stuff. Could be better? Of course. But after a day at Sutton we were both skiing well, especially Patricia who was keeping right up all day. Legs were getting shot and we'd both had our fill by the end of the day (2:30 for us).
Had planned on hopefully skiing the chutes and ridge. Ridge was closed, chutes had way too much exposed rock. Actually probably could have done Tuckerman's but I wasn't out to prove a point with tricky snow conditions.
Pics of Sutton in this post... Jay in the next.
Never been to Sutton. Great mountain but we could have picked a better day. It's a nice long ridge and the easier stuff is on the right and the harder stuff is in the middle or left. There's a lot of chairs but it only takes 3 chairs to get all the way from right (main lodge) to left (farthest and generally steeper area), and you can ski back from there without chairs.
So the lady selling tickets said she was warning everybody the trails were firm. I said okay, cool. Well, they were firm. And I don't sharpen my skis very often as they're absolute rock ski status as of about 2 years ago, with major damage all around including massive scratches, all kinds of big scrapes on the p-tex, parts of the top layer coming off, a weird bump where my ski must have bent too much in the p-tex, not to mention one of my ski brakes is now busted (not looking forward to having to chase that ski). The upside is I don't worry about shredding sticks, dirt, etc. I still avoid rocks but that's more of a safety thing.
Like I was saying my edges are shit. But I managed to find sides of trails and it was a good day to practice skiing dust on crust conditions.
Bump runs were generally better as long as we avoided the glare ice that was scattered around. Not that coverage was bad at all, there is plenty of snow there. It's just pretty frozen right now.
Better snow was generally in the woods but even the best case scenario was firm packed powder. So that's what we aimed for.
One trail called "Attraction" started off a decent firm mogul run and then ended with a very steep ice sheet. I wasn't paying great attention and somehow managed to traverse the entire ice sheet (once I realized what I was skiing over and how steep it was I attempted to not move a muscle and rather than not make it across the ice sheet, instead collide into the edge of the trail). So I did collide into the edge, which had about half a ski length of barely-any-snow and the rear of my skis were still on this very steep ice sheet. So the back of me starts sliding. I did manage to fortunately dig in hard and come to a stop quickly. "DO NOT COME THIS WAY" I yelled to Patricia.
We both end up sliding down 30 feet or so on the trails edge, using our butts of course, until we reached a skiable surface. Could have been worse.
After that we noticed that they were doing free demos. So we figured let's try some skis with fresh edges. I tried some Rossignol Super 7s (or something, they looked like decent hard pack skis). They were pretty good on the bumps but I would have preferred my skis with sharp edges.
We pretty much explored the whole mountain although there were some things we didn't ski that we definitely would have with better snow. Somehow we found that the double diamonds and woods were the most enjoyable because they were hard packed but not skied off, and the ice was more obvious. I don't like sneaky ice, and I really suck at skiing sneaky ice. Stuff makes me nervous.
Would definitely return with better snow, although it is a bit of a long haul.
So next day was Jay Peak, and we had high hopes for more and better snow there. Somehow crossing back into America was much more scutinized, with many questions and searching my trunk. I don't think the patrol guy is a skier. Staying in Sutton 2 nights to ski Sutton and Jay didn't make sense to him at all.
We got to Jay very early so I was optimistic I'd get to give Patricia a good tour of the hill, being her first time.
Jay basically had more and better snow, it was packed powder in the woods and groomed on trails. Some trails had ice like CanAm which was a mess, but we didn't try to ski stuff that looked like crap. High traffic trails got skied off by the end of the day but we had a great time with the following (I'll try to do in order at least ones I remember doing on purpose)..
Goat Run > Vertigo > Buckaroo Bonzai
Canyonland > Hell's Crossing > over to Jet area
Timbuktu
Kitz Woods > Angel's Wiggle
Ullr's Dream (had skied off parts) > Beaver Pond Glades > Kokomo
Everglade
Valhalla
I think we ended up doing maybe twice as many runs including some traversing but those were the highlights. All good stuff. Could be better? Of course. But after a day at Sutton we were both skiing well, especially Patricia who was keeping right up all day. Legs were getting shot and we'd both had our fill by the end of the day (2:30 for us).
Had planned on hopefully skiing the chutes and ridge. Ridge was closed, chutes had way too much exposed rock. Actually probably could have done Tuckerman's but I wasn't out to prove a point with tricky snow conditions.
Pics of Sutton in this post... Jay in the next.
