Mt. Ellen @ Sugarbush, 1/28/10 - Recovering nicely

[BushMogulMaster]

Today was much better than I expected. Unfortunately, I didn't end up getting any runs in with WJenness, but hopefully he'll chime in with his thoughts about today.

Started out on the cruisers. Cruiser, to be exact. Aside from one bad/slick turn, I thought it skied very nicely. My colleagues in the grooming department did a very nice job. It was machine groomed fg/pp, easy to hold an edge, and nice for carving.

Decided to cut into the bottom of Hammerhead/Cliffs (I call that "The Key"), and was pleasantly surprised to find 6-8" of accumulation and blow-in in the troughs of the bumps, which skied beautifully. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, the tops of the moguls strikingly resembled the surface of the moon. However, with all of the fresh and blown-in snow in the troughs, they skied great. Good enough that I decided to head for Cliffs. Ended up doing 4 runs on Cliffs. Lots of fun, especially the first two runs. Later in the day, the top section was a little on the gnarly side, but still quite skiable. The bottom section is great. There are two really nice zippers from tower 18 to the bottom of Cliffs where you can just let loose. Great stuff.

Ended up taking a few cruising runs with my little brother and his school group. Did Upper Rim Run, Lookin' Good, Elbow, and Cruiser. Aside from a slick spot here and there, they all skied very nicely. Great snowmaking on Rim Run and Elbow. Definitely a big plus.

Also took a Bravinator run (Upper Bravo to Exterminator), which was fun. It's hard underneath, but there's a fair amount of fresh snow to be found.

Overall, I was extremely happy with the quality of skiing, given the horrible weather early in the week. I was expecting hardpack, ice, and frozen granular. All of which I found, but there was a lot more good pp and blown-in pow than I expected. Lots of fun.


No pix... sorry.

 

[WJenness]

Had a great day at Ellen today.

Was on the lookout for BMM, but I didn't see him... Did see some of his tracks on The Cliffs though.

I had a really nice day skiing with one of my buddies (who decided to do the day on his sisters' snow blades), and enjoyed the mountain a lot.

As mentioned above, the groomers were skiing really nice. I too started by hitting cruiser which I enjoyed very much.

Rim Run and Elbow were skiing very nice with the snowmaking (aside from the one nasty spill I took on Elbow courtesy of getting my goggles frosted, and while trying to stop to fix that, I crossed my tips at decent speed and had a nice wipe out that caused me to get snow in places I didn't know I had)...

I really enjoyed looking good under the summit lift and Straight shot under GMX, I felt the snow was superb on those two trails in particular.

Inverness was an awesome race trail. I hit that after the racers left and had a great time ripping that trail in solitude.

I really loved the lack of crowds at Mount Ellen. There were times when it seemed like me and my friend were the only two people on a lift...

We did hit some ungroomed stuff, and I had a lot of trouble... It was partially due to conditions (under the fluff there was a lot of icy bumps that I was really good at finding), and partially due to me skiing scared on ungroomed trails today for some reason.

My best ungroomed run of the day was when I hit the bottom 2/3 of Bravo after the cut through from Elbow. This was at about 1:30 and it skied great. I hit Exterminator at one point and fought my way down it, but it kicked my butt pretty good. My biggest ass kicking of the day came on the trail that runs under the bottom half of the North Ridge Express. It took me a long time and many falls to get to the bottom of it...

But overall, a really nice day out skiing, and I'll be back to Mount Ellen before too long

-w