Ski Report: Okemo & Mount Snow, January 14 to 16, 2021

Sally, the girls, and I just got back from a few days in Vermont.  I went up with my buddy Josh early Thursday morning, leaving the house at about 5:30 am and driving straight to Okemo Mountain, Vermont.  We skied Okemo Thursday under flat, sometimes foggy conditions but had a really good time.  The snow was decent if a little sparse in spots, and anyway, there wasn't much ice, so I can't complain.  I feel like I rode pretty well.  We packed in some 20 runs over the course of an uncrowded Thursday, getting in just under 19,700 vertical feet.

Me and Josh at Okemo Mountain

That absolutely rocked.

I gotta say, my favorite runs from Thursday were the ones where we got a little lost.  The first time, we went from the top of the South Face down Rimrock but somehow missed the Glades Peak Quad and instead turned right down Sachem, a winding trail that leads through some of Okemo's condo developments, under a bridge, and all the way to the bunny slopes down by the Base Lodge.  All told, that took us 20 minutes or more and saw a descent of at least 2000 vertical feet.  Though Sachem is a green trail towards the base of the Okemo Mountain, it's one of my absolute favorites. It's this winding, out of the way thing that really feels like a backwoods exploration.

The other time we got lost -- lost-er, I should say -- we started over on the Jackson Gore Peak, went to the right down Tuckered Out, somehow hung a left at Espresso and thus missed the quad lift, descended Spur Line, Fast Track, and Inn Bound, and wound up at the Coleman Express Quad down by the Jackson Gore Parking Area.  Oops.  But yeah, that also took fully 20 minutes and saw us lose maybe 1500 or more vertical feet, though it then required two separate lifts to get back to the Jackson Gore summit.

Jackson Gore Trail Map. 
We followed the left-hand trails all the way down.

Obligatory selfie, at the Okemo Base Lodge just after lunch

The Sunburst Six lift on our initial run up the mountain.

My last note on Okemo is that we learned a trick while we were out there.  The only lift that had any line whatsoever on Thursday was the Sunburst Six.  We avoided that by taking the Black Ridge Triple, skiing down Double Dipper, and then hitting the Green Ridge Triple to the main summit.  That probably wouldn't be worth it were the Six-lift running at capacity, but with coronavirus restrictions on lift capacity, it saved us half an hour or more going around that one single line.

Following our 20-run marathon, Josh and I drove back to the Sterling Ski Club lodge at Mount Snow.  Josh is just 32, and he'd crushed me through the first five or so runs Thursday morning, but I absolutely killed him through the next ten.  The bad news is that my wife has been laid off twice this year from jobs at various Connecticut-based gyms.  The upside, though, is that the last one let her take one of their spin bikes as a kind of severance since they were closing for good.  I've been riding that thing several times per week over the past month or so, and at least on Thursday, all leg training really showed up.

So.  We got up comparatively late on Friday and drove a half-mile down the road to Mount Snow.  Wound up putting in some 15 runs total over 15,300 vertical feet.  It was a little icy over on the North Face, unfortunately, but we hit Beartrap twice right after we got on the mountain, and I hit Olympic twice once we worked our way over to the North Face.  Olympic was a lot less icy than Freefall or Fallen Timbers.  Happily, no one besides me wanted to go that far out of their way just to get in a run.  

The Sunbrook Face.  The leftmost trails are quite beautiful but rarely open.

Josh at the top of the North Face.

The Bluebird Express at Mount Snow

Overall, though, my favorite part of the day was skiing down Cloud 9 on the Sunbrook face, though the Sunbrook lift was closed.  We did that a couple of times but then had to take the Beartrap lift up to Long John, back around to the Main Lodge, and then up the Summit Express Quad.  That's definitely the long way around, but it was worth it to hit those empty backside trails.

Josh dropped me back at the lodge early Friday afternoon and then headed back home to meet up with his girlfriend.  I cleaned up a little -- myself and the lodge -- and waited until Sally and the girls arrived Friday evening.  We built a fire and had dinner while the kids ran around the lodge like maniacs.  We then settled in to see how bad the snow would get before Saturday morning.  We had reservations to ski again at Okemo, but the State of Vermont was by then under a heavy Winter Storm Warning.  They were waiting on some 6 to 12 inches of snow, followed by rain, followed by more snow.

Let me tell you, it turned out to be fully 12 inches of snow.  We set out for Okemo at around 7:30 am, going maybe 20 mph using our Honda's low-gear four-wheel drive setting.  Even then, we didn't make it.  Downed trees fell everywhere.  A policeman finally stopped us and turned us around right around the halfway point, so we turned back, again inching our way south through what can only be described as extremely treacherous, blizzard conditions.  An hour and forty minutes later, we arrived safely back at Mount Snow.  I'd been fortunate to get enough cell service to cancel our reservations at Okemo and make new reservations at Snow, doubly so because some folks who'd planned to ski Snow had cancelled their own reservations, thus making room on the mountain for us.  

I really have to hand it to Sally for the morning's driving.  She drove through white-knuckled conditions for almost two full hours, keeping us safe and happy when it definitely did not have to go that way.  We saw lot of questionable driving decisions -- often with predictable outcomes -- but somehow managed to avoid all of it.

Anyway, there we were, no shit, skiing Mount Snow with about 12 inches of very fresh, very wet, very heavy powder.  Sally and the girls had never really seen anything like that, and I've only skied it rarely.  We just don't get a lot of big powder days like that up in Vermont.  

Needless to say, we fell a lot.

Fun day, but a definite learning curve dealing with that heavy, wet pow, and by the time I made it over to the North Face, the whole side was covered with massively bumped-up whales.  I fell so hard a couple of times, I felt like I'd gotten a chiropractic adjustment.  I even somehow managed to dig an edge on top of one of those whales and launch myself face-first down the mountain.  Needless to say, I'm a little sore right now.

Obligatory selfie, at the Mount Snow's summit

I took this from the lift on the North Face.  Note the whales.

Sally took this amazing shot from the Sunbrook lift.

Another from the Sunbrook lift.  Getting bumpy, but not quite to whales yet.

Really good day, though.  We started with a couple of laps on the south side, running Cloud 9 and Little Dipper to Moonbeam, and that was a blast!  Those trails are rarely open, but they're super-pretty, and they had really good snow yesterday.  After that, I hit the North Face while Sally and the kids ran some greens, and then we closed with a run down Long John to Nitro and the terrain park.  I got just 6 runs total over 5600 vertical feet, but man, I was twice as exhausted from those runs as I was from the previous two days.  Working through that heavy-ass powder was no joke.