Last Two Days in Vermont

We're headed out this morning after what now feels like a long, fun roadtrip. 

On the bike path with Mount Mansfield behind us

Mount Mansfield

As promised, we climbed Mount Mansfield yesterday. Mansfield is the highest peak in Vermont, rising almost 4400 feet above sea level. We didn't start at sea level, thankfully, but this was still the hardest hike we've done in years. We wound up hiking a little more than six miles up and back, gaining almost 2600 vertical feet along the way.

Greetings from Northern Vermont

 In case you're wondering how things are going up in Vermont this week...

We're living in the winter of perfect conditions here in the Northeast. It's been snowing virtually every day. If you don't mind dressing warmly, life has been pretty good. Conditions then warmed up yesterday, and now, I think maybe we're into spring skiing for the rest of the season.

Which is fine, if I'm being honest.

Stowe Mountain as seen from a chairlift

The Worst-Kept Secret in the World

The worst-kept secret in the world is that Sally and I have been working on a skiing training plan for her business, Headspace.Fit. 

We asked folks how much they were training now and how much they thought they ought to train for a specific event.
Consensus said 5-10 hours per week with some flexibility built into the schedule.

You may remember that we launched a little survey on Survey Monkey last week asking folks' thoughts on what a potential training plan ought to look like? 

That survey was for this project.

Blog Shots: Skiing Mt.Snow with Sally

 It’s not unusual that we’d ski Mt. Snow. I just happen to like how a few of these pictures came out. I’ve been taking a photography course online, and I feel like I’m actually learning something.

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.

Merry Christmas, My Friends

Good morning and Merry Christmas, everyone.  

As I write this, it's Christmas morning.  I'm sitting in a ski lodge just down the road from Mount Snow's Carinthia base listening to the rain.  Sally and the girls are asleep in their rooms just a few feet away.  We skied Okemo yesterday, finding good snow but lousy visibility in the morning before high-altitude winds hit as the forefront of the current storm.  Those blew away the low-lying fog, allowing us to at least see, but they also shut down the lifts running all the way to Okemo’s summit.  We had a really good day on the lower half of the mountain, but at age 47, I've reached that stage where it can take quite a few runs to get fully warmed up.  

Our tenth and last run was by far my best.  Go figure.

Pics from Mount Snow -- Feb 28, 2020

Went up to Mount Snow on Thursday night with my buddy Josh from work.  This is the second time we've skied together.  I like skiing with Josh not only because he is a fun and funny dude but also because we're pretty similar in ability and comfort levels out on the slopes.

Our plans kind of came together at the last minute.  Mount Snow was projected to get something like 10 inches of snow throughout the course of last week.  Late in the week, however, the storm trended a little warmer, dropping mixed precipitation and even some rain showers followed by snow.  So we weren't quite sure what we were going to get.

As it happened, we wound up with maybe 4 to 6 inches of heavy, wet powder, which was fine -- and basically unnoticeable -- on the groomed trails, but a Hell of a lot fun throughout the ungroomed trails and natural snow areas off to the side of the North Face.  In particular, PDF and Plummet were in great shape, and when we hit Challenger early yesterday morning, I think we might've cut first tracks through some fairly deep pow.

Not an experience I'd ever had in Vermont.  It was fun as anything.

Pics are past the jump.

Pico Mountain

Pico Mountain is a small, family-style ski resort that sits just north of Killington, Vermont.  Regular readers may already know that I have a soft spot for the smaller, family-owned mountains, and it put Pico on my list of must-visit locations early last year.  Saying that Pico is family-owned is kind of a misnomer, though, since Killington itself bought Pico way back in the mid-1990s and has since been bought by KSL Capital -- the group behind the IKON Pass.  But somehow Pico remains a small, friendly, relatively affordable spot offering a distinct value proposition alongside big brother Killington and the rest of Vermont’s corporate resorts.  That’s actually amazing.  We got a set of VIP tickets to Pico through the Sterling Ski Club back in October, and we finally used them just this past weekend.

Overlooking the lower part of the mountain from the top of the Little Pico Triple Chair.

5 Things on a Friday: Skiing the Super Bowl

Happy Friday, friends.  Let’s get to it.

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.

Favorite Photos of 2019

Happy New Year, everyone! 

This has been a year in which Sally and I have mostly kept on keeping on.  Arguably the biggest changes in my life were my decision to commit to skiing more last winter, taking up photography early in the summer, and writing a Hell of a lot for As For Football. 

This post is most obviously about the photography.  However, it's influenced by all three.  First, I wrote so much for AFF that there's really not enough material from the blog to do a best-of retrospective for 2019.  That's been a long-running series here, and I'm sad to skip it, but there's just not much point.  Luckily, I have these pictures to show, so it's not a total wash.  A good number of these come from shots taken for AFF, so before we bemoan the lack of additional writing, it's worth remembering that the As For Football crew sent me to a heck of a lot of really fun football games this year. 

That's not nothing.

The one regret that I have with this is that it's tough to show size and aspect ratios via the blog.  Some of these ought to be shown big and others are just wide or skinny.  None of that comes across in this format.  I'd like to have a little show in our backyard, but that's definitely a project for the spring or early summer.  Paired with beer tasting and a friendly audience, it could be fun.  We'll see.

Let me just say, too, that I don't know that I'm necessarily good at this.  However, I enjoy it, and I've never been shy about showing my work to others.

For all of these, you can click the pics to them at full size.

Magic Mountain, Vermont

We finally got out to Magic Mountain this week.  We skied Mount Snow on Christmas Day and then Magic on the day after Christmas, hoping to avoid the post-Christmas crush.  

The Red Line Lift at Magic Mountain

This turned out to be a great idea.  Magic was awesome!

Skiing at Stratton

Sally and I took the family to Stratton Mountain last weekend. We drove up on Friday afternoon after Thanksgiving, stayed overnight, and skied Saturday. This marked both our first time at Stratton and our first time skiing Thanksgiving Weekend. 

Family selfie at Stratton's summit.

Digital Camera Experiments Revisited

The more you learn, the less you know.  I really need to get down to the library to get a couple of books on photography, but I just haven't had time.  That hasn't stopped me from taking pictures.

I took this on the drive into the office during the heat wave last week.
It's heavily filtered, obviously.

Mount Snow

Mount Snow is my favorite Vermont-area ski resort.  It’s also the southernmost of the large Vermont ski resorts and the resort with the best artificial snowmaking.  A big part of what I like about is in its location; it’s maybe sixty miles closer than Killington, making it a much better destination for single-day sessions or quick overnighters.  Granted, Mount Snow is not as large as Killington or Okemo and has fewer trails than Stratton on about the same acreage.  Still, with 86 runs spread across 588 skiable acres on four separate faces, it’s not exactly small...