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Bolton Valley, VT 12/30/2010

J.Spin

New member
Joined
Oct 26, 2006
Messages
112
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Location
Waterbury, VT
Website
JandEproductions.com
Date(s) Skied: Thursday, December 30th, 2010

Resort or Ski Area: Bolton Valley, VT

Conditions: Packed powder on piste, generally 1 to 2 feet of powder off piste

Trip Report: After Tuesday’s great outing with the boys, the whole family headed out for more turns on Thursday. The skies had been somewhat gray on Wednesday, but the sun was back for Thursday and consistent with the forecast trends, the temperatures were climbing to the low 30s F.

There hadn’t been any new snow, so we didn’t find ourselves out to the slopes until midday, but the Timberline area still seemed to be following the trends I’ve seen over the week and most visitors were presumably over at the main mountain. We kicked things off on Spell Binder, and the most obvious change in on piste conditions from Tuesday was that the powder and chowder had been replaced by packed powder. I found that there was still powder to be had if I went very tight to the edge of the trail, but it had to be helmet-scraping tight.

We then headed off to the trees for a bit to get in some powder skiing – E had gone with alpine skis for the day so that we could explore some steeper lines and see how they were faring. Our first test was the steep terrain dropping into the KP glades, which revealed that tight evergreens at around the 2,000’ elevation had still not seen enough snow to support much traffic or aggressive skiing. The evergreens had not allowed enough snow to fall to the forest floor, but the mixed evergreen/hardwood glades below were in prime form and yielding great untracked turns.

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We also made some runs on Twice As Nice, which was starting to form some bump lines – the kind that would be great for people that are just learning to ski moguls. On another run we hit some of the trees above Wood’s Hole, and the narrow lines had some tracks but held excellent snow that had been protected from the wind. Dylan had want to stay out of there and ski some on piste terrain, but after hearing a “Woo Hoo!” from me in the KP glades on one of our runs, he decided that he had to get back into the trees and check it out.

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Ty and I had only skied some of the upper part of Doug’s Woods, but when we were down at the base lodge I could see that the snow looked good all the way to the Timberline base. We never left the Timberline area, but I did hear that Wilderness opened up for the first time this season, meaning that Bolton had all of its lifts running. We didn’t find this out until Thursday evening, but we planned to head over there on Friday to check it out.

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J.Spin
 
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