Jason215

1 hour ago, snowgeek said:

Went to Gore last weekend and used a free ticket.  It was pretty good.  Some glades were open and were nice.  Lots of trails up top were open with natural snow, but coverage was iffy in spots.  Rocks here and there.  Cruisers were in good shape.  Was deciding between Bromley, Stratton and Magic tomorrow.  Going by myself so trying to shorten my drive from Albany.  Bromley is $44 if you buy online and looks to be fully open!  They report 53" for the season.  Magic looks to have everything open and would be $61.  They report 43" for the season.  Tomorrow is a ski club discount day at Stratton so it would be $47 for me.  They report only 39" for the season.  14" less than Bromley which is just a few miles down the road?    I've been to Magic and Bromley a lot lately, but haven't skied Stratton since the 80's lol.  I thought it might be a good time to check it out since it's cheap tomorrow and hopefully the winter crowds aren't there yet?  They seem to be like 1/2 open but conditions look pretty epic and they have glades open.  Any thoughts would be appreciated......and if anyone wants to meet up, LMK.  First world dilemma lol.  

If you haven’t skied Stratton in that long, go with them. For $47, you can’t beat it. And even though they are only half open, it’s a big mountain and would have many options for you.  I wouldn’t think the crowds would be that bad this early in the season. If I didn’t have prior commitments this weekend, I’d take you up on your offer. 

BTW, Jay Peak is now 100% open as well. 

Let’s hope we can quickly recover from this Sunday’s rain storm. I’m hoping it would just add to the density of the snow pack rather than melt much of it. 

-Jason 

On 11/26/2018 at 11:27 AM, LongBeachSurfFreak said:

What an absolutely epic weekend at Stratton! Like others have said it’s deep deep winter in the mountains. Saturday was almost a bluebird day with amazing conditions. And even Sunday was great as any overnight rain had ended and snow loss was pretty much zero. The best part was I had the place to myself with walk on Gondi rides both days. First time in the woods and many lines dropped!

The new snow bowl lift construction has half the mountain closed until completion though which is a bummer.

let the good times continue this week!!

  

Looks good! I hit Kmart on Saturday. Conditions were great for November. Didn’t ski Sunday as it was raining and socked in fog through late morning.  

After this latest Dump, this season is off to an epic start. 

Jason

2 hours ago, powderfreak said:

Lets call this a great start to the season.

 

Love it when a dude takes a header when you are shooting pow shots.

 

Incredible pics! Thanks for sharing.

Jason

35 minutes ago, powderfreak said:

Low angle woods have been very good this weekend.  Crazy to ski trees in mid-November, even if they are just noodle lines.  These are pretty low elevation too.

Thanks for the great pic. It looks like mid-January.  I usually write off all of November and half of December for skiing since it’s usually marginal most years (especially Killington southward). 

9 hours ago, J.Spin said:

I don’t have data for other areas of the Northeast, but tree skiing in November is actually rather common in the Northern Greens.  It starts in November in about ¼ (26.3%) of seasons.

Once the snowpack at the Mt. Mansfield Stake hits roughly 24 inches, that’s about the time you’ll find people starting to ski the trees around here (mean start date is Dec 12^th ± 19 days).  I ran an analysis several years back in which I compared that 24” number to actual empirical online reports of people tree skiing, and it lined up fairly well.  Using 24” is not overly aggressive (you’ll find people who will venture in before that), and it’s not as conservative at the 40” rule, it’s more of a decent measure of when semi-conservative folks will start venturing into appropriately maintained areas.

Early season snowpack here can sometimes start as a lot of fluff (which means more than 24” may required for tree skiing) or dense snow (where less than 24” can suffice), so the 24” value is going to be an average of those possibilities.

I’m not even sure if the stake has hit the 24” mark yet this season (the most recent report I’ve seen is 19”), so this is a great example of a season below that threshold because of the dense snowfall we’ve seen.

Having the tree skiing around here start this early in November is a bit less common, it happens in about 10% of seasons.

The updated plot (through 2017-2018) for the date of reaching 24” at the stake is posted below, which shows the number of times and dates in the past 60 years or so when tree skiing would have started in November.

Thanks for the informative post JSpin. I figured we were close to a month ahead of schedule for trees in the Northen Greens. What I didn’t realize is that November tree skiing in mid-November was not as rare as I had thought. 

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of tree skiing in November on the East Coast! That’s awesome. Looks like we’re off to a rockin start to the ski season. I can’t remember as robust an early season as this. Great combination of cold snowmaking temps plus several natural snowfalls and more of both over the next few weeks!  Heading over to Killington for next weekend’s World Cup. Thinking they should have quite a bit of terrain open by then. 

Jason