Comparative snow reporting

Now that I'm back in the great not-so-white north, I can check the Jay on-line snow report. Here's the report for today, which would summarize the conditions Telemark Dave and I experienced this week:

Conditions are ok. Much closer to winter than spring. At least until early afternoon or so. Even then, conditions will be firmer than you expect for most of the day. This is either good or bad. Your call.

Whoever writes this report should hand over the keyboard to the author of the far more "let's call it like it is" JPSP snow report found at the bottom of the Jet on Wednesday:


Then there is the far more open-ended and colourful report found at Mad River Glen the next day:


And finally, the report of the random Jay skier we met at the Goat/Taxi intersection, one of the few soft snow places on the mountain on Wednesday. He skied up to Dave, stopped, looked him in the eye and said one word:

"Smooshie!"

Dave looked at him as if he was speaking a foreign language, or perhaps even, was a visitor from another planet. Random Skier then expounded with a little more detail:

"It's smooshie!"

Ah yes, smooshie snow. How did we miss it the first time?

Blog it if you can...

Well, faithful readers, I'm sitting in the base lodge at Mad River Glen, beside a big pile of "ski it if you can" stickers. What a great hill! I feel like it is 1972. Conditions are fast on the two runs that have been groomed. Everything else is rock hard and/or suffering from a lack of snow. We skied Jay yesterday. Windy, sunny, cold and the snow stayed hard as concrete all day. In fact, it seemed to get harder, except for the lower Goat, which was a wierd semi-frozen slush. Freezer and tram were on wind delay all day. MRG is way more fun in these conditions.

Time to stop blogging like an uber-geek and go skiing!

Editor's note: apparently some readers were thinking I was far more geekish than they realized, toting my laptop to the hill so I could blog on a pirated wi-fi signal. Have some faith, please. The nice folks at MRG have installed a public computer with high-speed access right beside the cafeteria food line entrance. Always on, no charge. Best of all, it's a Mac!

Jonny Jay steps up

SBR here, I'm posting this on JJ's behalf:

Ok I’ve tried three times to put this on the blog and I NOW GIVE UP.

Well boys and girls, if you're not pulling my leg then I am really envious! Sounds like the snow finally stuck on the mountain. While you were blowing up the powder, DC and I were running through the Philadelphia airport, heading for the sun.

Rather than snorkeling through the pow-pow we then strapped on the masks and headed for the coral canyons where white sandy ocean bottom was flanked by 5-10 foot coral walls creating a maze of intertwining corridors of various types of coral. Quite spectacular, except for the sounds of the Devon Cusser (who reserves namechange rights), who was swallowing the ocean beside me!

Hopefully we have a few more days when the snow Gods will shine on us and maybe we'll get some great spring skiing -- of course Jay doesn't really have spring skiing do they? Not like the old days when Jay would stay open till late April/early May before we would head off to Mad River for the final days of the season. By that time the Jay HARDSCRABBLE starts to soften, but not before! Hope you're impressed that I worked in HARDSRABBLE.

So as our old buddy Chris used to say Ski ya!

See you on the slopes.

Jonny Jay

PS

I am sure the boys thought of me as they were doing face shot after face shot – young showboats!

Who has the ruler?

And I quote:

"We're 100% open, have had more than 14 FEET of snow since February 1st and are poised for a long run into Spring."

Hey, didn't we have trouble finding the fabled five feet snow? Now we have to go looking for 14. I sure hope it's out there, as SBR and Telemark Dave will be headed for Jay the last week of March.

Mother Nature Gave Me A Present

Military Day........ March 4Th ................Pudd's Birthday
I just read Green Beret's post and I could not have said it any better. Best run I had all year including Cat Skiing. Face Shot after Face Shot.
Thanks for the present Mother Nature.

Pudd

PS I took a mouth shot from a 2 inch diameter branch........ but came out of it unscarred.

Military Day - the General and Skiers favourite day

MARCH FOURTH - 2007

This is a day that will be remembered all season. JJ and DC were sitting on a plane on their way to Jamaica, while I was eating oatmeal and preparing for one of the biggest ski days of the season. I wanted to get up to the hill at 8:00 for first trax on the blue chair, but I felt my little Chevy just couldn't make it up that hill, with the reported 12 Inches. No problem of getting up to the hill at a reasonable hour as I got a lift up with Pudd and his HEMI. (got to mountain at 8:20).

Pudd and I were about 15th chair up the Bonny for First Trax, we knew that everyone was thinking CAN AM and River Quai, we had to make a wise choise on what the first run was going to be.
"Power Line?" I said
We decided to go Power Line, about 3rd and 4th down, pleanty of POW to spare. You could really let the skis go, it was a good thing we were both running with the big planks.

When we hit the Taxi intersection, Pudd and I decided to go lower Lift Line, right under the red chair. As there was pleanty of Freshie on Lift Line and the chairs were packed with people, we decided to do the old fashion side by side rush through the powder. I came blasting down the bumps, being hit with snow in the face on every mogul, Pudd said all he could see was my yellow pom pom hat and a cloud of snow. The chairs were cheering us on with yelps and comments. "Dont stop, keep GOIN!!". We never stopped, we needed our speed if we wanted to take the POW over head every turn. When we finished the run, we both stopped to take a breather. "Hey you guys better get up their and do that again, the way you guys skied that!" said a lady on the chair.

After that, we got a lot of good runs in, Pudd had to leave early, to make it back to SO. So I skied the rest of the day by myself, I managed to find first trax and powder all day long. I had a great line down Lead Boots later on in the day and all the secret stash's were in great shape.

As Pudd left early, I had no lift back home, so I had to hitchike back to Montgomery CTR. After about 10 minutes, finally a big diesel Ford 2500, Landscaping truck from Eastern Ontario with 4 or 5 kids inside pull up and tell me to get in the box. This monster of a truck barely made it up the hill as we were going about 20 kmh spinning all over the place, I thought we were going to have to get out and push. It was a good thing I was still earing my tuke and goggles though, It was a chilly trip down to Montgomery.

While we're waiting, here's the local report...

I'm looking forward to some excellent reports from this weekend, assuming you all made the epic drive through the blizzard.

SBR had to content himself with night skiing at Hidden Bump, which is always entertaining. Conditions were very good - lots of tracked up loose snow and very few people. The skiing was fun too, except when the 8 year kid straitlining the big hill launched off my rear twin tip, causing me to fall over in the middle of a high speed tele-turn. Never got up so fast in my life, roared down to bottom, stopped him in his tracks and gave him a grumpy old guy lecture on the perils of skiing too fast.

Comment of the evening, overheard from below as I sat in the dark on the chair:

Hoser on skis #1: "this powder is tough going, eh?"

Hoser on skis #2: "yeah, it really bogs you down."

They were snowplowing the edge of the run...