Bretton Woods - 3/28/10

[speden]

Conditions: 30's, some wind, cloudy/hazy sun, variable conditions

Decided to do an overnight trip to Bretton Woods this weekend with one my sons. I could've done a day trip, but didn't feel like so much driving in one day. So I booked a ski and stay room at the old Mount Washington hotel.

The hotel is pretty much unchanged from when I went last year. Only upgrade I noticed was they replaced all the cheap little tube TV's with nice flat screens. The rooms are still noisy, with bad soundproofing and noisy pipes. Kind of adds to the olde time feel of it. The breakfast buffet is still top notch (except the Salmon was going off since they don't keep it on ice). My son had a good time in the arcade, and we had a nice swim in the outdoor pool. There was a really loud and pretty good live band in the Cave.

When I woke up this morning I checked the weather. I thought it would be a little warmer today, but it was still in the 20's. The lifts open at 8am, but we took our time to give things a chance to warm up. We got on the hill about 9:30, and the groomed trails were about an inch of loose granular over hardpack. Pretty edgeable and fast all day. Most of the trails had good coverage, but on some trails there's exposed ground, and they seem to have stopped grooming those, so those were a little choppy and hard, like the appropriately named "Granny's Grit"

Some of the best runs we found were over on the West Mountain. Those had good coverage and were well groomed. I particularly liked "Starr King". We also found some good trails off the Bethlehem Express, like "In Between". Some of the green's were skiing surprisingly well, since they seem to have the deepest base and didn't get scraped off, like "Avalon", "Range View", and "Big Ben". Crowds were minimal today, so we were flying down those.

Without much sun, the snow didn't really soften until about one or two in the afternoon. My son did a few of the glades in the morning, but he said the snow was pretty firm. On our second to last run, we did some bumps on "Aggassiz", which were partially softened by mid-afternoon.

Some pics:

Here's the grand old lady, still looking good. Seems to be a lot of snow up on Mt. Washington.

Here's the heated pool out back. It's nice, but they forgot to put in hot tubs next to it. In the cold weather you really want a hot tub to soothe those muscles, and then a dip in the big pool to "cool off".

Here's the entrance to "Glade West". Pretty good coverage.

This is kind of typical of the coverage they have on most of the trails that don't get a lot of sun. This is taken from the West Mountain Express. One thing I don't like about BW is many of their trails are just too wide and straight. It was hard to find a nice narrow winding trail today.

Here's a shot from the Top o' Quad restaurant area. You get a nice view of the valley.

Here's the entrance to the ungroomed Aggassiz.

This is the start of the bumps on Aggassiz. They got a lot bigger and deeper after this.

 

[riverc0il]

Here's the entrance to the ungroomed Aggassiz.

Ski areas need more signs like this. I like.

Nice report.

 

[speden]

Ski areas need more signs like this. I like.

Bretton Woods shows a little more grooming restraint than other places. Some of the trails are so wide they will leave half of the trail ungroomed. For example, "Oscar Barron's" was like that yesterday. But with the cold snap the ungroomed part of that trail was too hard and choppy to be much fun.

Looks like they've dropped their open trail count down to 74 from 99 this weekend. I'd say 99 was a slight exaggeration this weekend since they were open, but some of them were pretty borderline.

Can't believe we're getting yet another March monsoon. I hope the northern resorts don't get hit too hard.