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Saturday, January 11, 2020

Skiing Killington

I finally got up to Killington yesterday with my buddies Rob and Josh.  I hadn’t been since 2002, and man, has that place changed a lot!  Josh and I took a half-day at work on Thursday and met Rob here in Stratford.  We then drove up together Thursday afternoon.  We stopped at the Whetstone Station Brewery in Brattleboro for dinner, and from there we drove out to the Sterling Ski Club’s Mount Snow Lodge.  Everybody hit the rack kind of early Thursday night, so we could get up early Friday for the drive up to the mountain.  
Rob at Whetstone Station.
I didn’t realize it when we were putting our plans together, but Killington is fully ninety minutes up Route 100 from Mount Snow.  It actually wasn’t too bad in practice yesterday morning, but I can’t really recommend West Dover as a stopover for this particular trip unless you already happen to belong to a ski club with a lodge in town.  We drove right past Stratton and Okemo on the way up to Killington, and Bromley was maybe five miles off our route.  Friday was a Connecticut Ski Council day up at Killington and Pico, so that’s why we went there specifically, but we drove right past several really great skiing mountains just to ski Killington.  That’s not the way we usually play it.
Killington is enormous.  That’s arguably its biggest selling feature.  The mountain is fully three-and-half hours up the road from Coastal Connecticut, so it’s not exactly right around the corner, but they have seven different skiing areas and the second-highest peak in the entire state -- 4241 feet.  The total vertical drop is over 3000 feet, and you can actually ski all of that in a single forty-minute run if you really want to.  We wound up doing exactly that at the end of the day in order to get back to our car!  Moreover, Killington has nearly 2000 acres of skiable terrain.  That makes it roughly triple the size of Mount Snow or Okemo.  Basically, the mountain is mind-blowingly huge, to the point that it’s super-easy to just sort of get lost and ski all over the place.
At Dunkin on the drive up.
In the gondola up from the parking lot.  My phone died early in the day,
so I don't have any more pictures, unfortunately.
We parked at the Skyeship lodge way at the base of the mountain and caught a gondola from there all the way up to mid-mountain.  Highly recommended!  We tried to get from that point over to the K-1 Lodge and the express gondola to the summit, but in the moment, we wound up wandering down the other side on Skyburst, back up to the same general area, and then back down the other side on Skyelark.  From there we humped it over to the gondola and went all the way to the summit.  They’d had maybe thirteen inches of snow during the week, and we saw intermittent snow during the day yesterday, so conditions were mostly very good, though it got quite windy at times.  They never had to close any of the lifts, which was a minor miracle, but I did get some sleet and freezing rain stuck on my goggles late in the morning, forcing me to ski using the Force.

 Not recommended.  I never bit it because I couldn’t see, but it was a weird and scary experience trying to ski mostly by feel.

 The day’s highlights included doing Outer Limits over on Bear Mountain under clear conditions late in the morning and doing Great Northern off the summit after lunch.  Outer Limits was the first double-black I’ve done in several years, but the conditions were terrific, and I hit a groove going down.  It’s not super-easy navigating moguls on a snowboard, but I’ve been doing a ton of reverse lunges and Russian twists in the gym these last few months, so I managed to whip my board around repeatedly, getting between and around the moguls in control and working my way down slowly but surely.  Felt super-pleased with myself afterwards.  By contrast, Great Northern is a fairly straightforward blue, but it’s a very long, very pretty tree-lined avenue that runs all the way down the main face from the tip-top of the mountain.  Highlights include several tunnels that take you under other trails.  It was a blast!
Look at this trail map!
My low-light came right after we did Outer Limits.  We skied to mid-mountain and tried Ovation, a single black with much smaller moguls but much, much more ice.  It looked navigable from the top, but once we got into the run, I realized that the backsides of moguls were frozen solid.  I must’ve bit it six times in five minutes.  I just couldn’t dig an edge into that ice.  We found the bottom of the trail closed and had to cut over on another sheet of ice to Superstar, another single black with “all natural snow,” i.e. solid ice.  No really.  It looked like someone had built a skating rink into the side of a mountain.  I bit it on my first cut and slid for fully half a minute before I managed to dig an edge into that shit and get back up on my feet.  For a second there, I legit thought I was gonna slide all the way down the mountain on my face.  
That was not fun.
Killington has a bunch of base lodges and a large summit lodge.  Alas, we never made it into the summit lodge.  We had lunch at the K-1 Lodge at the main base, and lunch itself was great, but the lodge lacks the charm of Mount Snow’s Carinthia Lodge or Magic’s Black Line Tavern.  Food was good, though, so that counts.  I had the Vermont Cheddar Mac-and-Cheese, and I really liked it.



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On the drive home, I asked Rob what he would say about Killington.  He said, “It’s a big place, and you never know what you’re going to get.  It’s a great place to explore.  You can be on a blue, and it winds up being this long, meandering trail, or it might just as easily have a steep drop with moguls.  That was fun.”

 We had a really good time out there.  I wish Killington was a little closer, but it was definitely worth the trip.
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