Acreage and Other Ski Area Size Measurements Revisited

[Patrick]

Holy $hit! :shock: And I thought I needed a hobby!

I wanted to calculate the size of les 3 vallées, but gave up quick.

 

[J.Spin]

I'm curious about the 5000 acre number for SB you referenced above. This implies an additional 1000 acres for the "near beyond" at SB. I think the 4000 acres they reference includes everything from Jester over to Brambles and the Upper Inverness area up to Stark Mtn that they own as well. If that's the case, I'm not sure how you get to 1000 acres. There really isn't any room between Upper Inverness and the 20th Hole, and then on the other end of the spectrum, I'm not aware of much in the way of skiable terrain in the Bradley Brook drainage and down towards Lincoln Gap Rd. I mean, I guess it's technically skiable, but there's been very little work back there, so I don't know if it would be worth it. Then again, I could be completely off base with that.

Great points Mike, I was just assuming that the 4,300-acre number that Sugarbush uses was for border to border on the trails of the Lincoln Peak and Mt. Ellen areas with the intervening Slide Brook terrain included. Based on what you wrote above, I should probably point out that the Sugarbush website appears to currently be using a more round number of 4,000+ acres, but I got the 4,300-acre number from their website/literature when I wrote a response in one of my Lost Trail Powder Mountain threads back in 2006. Compared to Stowe, where one can count four areas of traverse sidecountry (terrain off each side of Spruce, and terrain off each side of Mansfield) I figured with the Slide Brook area already included, that would leave only two areas of additional sidecountry to add for Sugarbush acreage. So, I said, OK, that's about half of what I added on to Stowe (1,000’ – 2,000 acres = ~1,500 acres) so throwing on 700 acres to come out at an even 5,000 seemed reasonable for a rough estimate. However, if Sugarbush's 4,300-acre number already includes the phantom lift area up toward Stark Mountain, removing that area as sidecountry terrain to add to the acreage total, the 5,000-acre number probably comes down a bit. At the far southern end of the resort, I was recalling all the stuff I’ve skied off the Snowball, Lower Snowball, and Cat’s Meow areas, like “The Shop Run” or some of the woods outside Snowball. Those woods outside Snowball aren’t necessarily the greatest, and there are some dense spots as I show in the second video, but there are also some sweet lines like that last one that E skis. I’m sure the area could be improved with some work. We’ve of course been tempted many times to explore and head all the way down to the Lincoln Gap Road/West Hill Road area from there, but we’ve never gotten around to it. As the contour really wraps around in that area, it might make for a long traverse back, so I can’t speak to the logistics of that sidecountry terrain. Some of it might be more practical as a backcountry or car-spotting type terrain depending on how far out you go. Thanks to you though, I was reminded of that area and just added it to my ever-growing list of backcountry spots to explore. So anyway, the 5,000-acre number was very rough, but hopefully you can see where I was coming from.

-J

 

[jamesdeluxe]

That is why I always prefered vertical. That is the only constant number that is easily measurable (if the ski area likes to fudge this stats). Vertical at place A and B = same thing is measured.

You lost me... you've always preferred vertical to accomplish what? Sure, it's the only apples-to-apples stat, but that's not what we're discussing. To use the classic example for the hundredth time, Whiteface has more lift-assisted vertical than any ski area in Utah... if that's the only thing that you're comparing, Whiteface wins. Monarch, CO only has 1,180 vertical (about a third of WF), but offers a lot more skiable terrain.

Obviously, skiable acreage is open to interpretation due to many things, including the skier's ability.

 

[Patrick]

That is why I always prefered vertical. That is the only constant number that is easily measurable (if the ski area likes to fudge this stats). Vertical at place A and B = same thing is measured.

You lost me... you've always preferred vertical to accomplish what? Sure, it's the only apples-to-apples stat, but that's not what we're discussing.

And this discussion started as Moonbasin being in trouble, right? :lol:

To use the classic example for the hundredth time, Whiteface has more lift-assisted vertical than any ski area in Utah....

Well, I like long runs. :-D

if that's the only thing that you're comparing, Whiteface wins. Monarch, CO only has 1,180 vertical (about a third of WF), but offers a lot more skiable terrain.

Blue Mountain in Collingwood, ON also., but pretty much up and down yoyoing. :mrgreen:

Obviously, skiable acreage is open to interpretation due to many things, including the skier's ability.

That is why I don't pay attention to it. I look at vertical, do some research and look at the layout. So the fact that some count in, some measure it versus lenght of trails in Europe...I don't care...cuz I totally ignore it when I look at a ski area.

:stir: Carry on...

edit: reghardless if it's counted or not...I know if it skiable and how long it can go with vertical.

 

[jamesdeluxe]

regardless if it's counted or not...I know if it skiable and how long it can go with vertical.

If you're not interested in counting, quantifying, and comparing things, I think it's safe to say that you're on the wrong internet forum.

 

[Patrick]

regardless if it's counted or not...I know if it skiable and how long it can go with vertical.

If you're not interested in counting, quantifying, and comparing things, I think it's safe to say that you're on the wrong internet forum.

I agree to disagree on the above statement 9 times out of 10 based if it's an El Nino year and what Larry Shick says about snow water-ratio in the PNW versus the ratio of Lake Effect snow effect at Mad River Glen when there is solar eclipse.

 

[jamesdeluxe]

True, all roads lead to Larry Schick.

 

[Tony Crocker]

True, all roads lead to Larry Schick.

He's never posted here, despite my occasional requests. I did suggest powderfreak contact him when he was graduating UVM, but I don't know whether that happened.

I still want to prod JSpin into some western comparisons with Stowe/MRG. The reason I start questioning the 2,000+ acre claims in the East is that's what areas like Alpine Meadows, Kirkwood and Alta claim. In those cases a lot of the terrain is out of the trees completely. So some reduction is in order vs. areas like that. The more difficult question is vs. areas like Whitefish/Baldy where the trees are there but widely spaced with more room for skiing than in Vermont. I really don't think this is rocket science. If trees consume half of a sector's acreage, the other half is what should be counted vs. a sector without trees.

Tony, skiable woods are in the eye of the beholder. You and I have a different definition. I'd imagine that J and I would have a different definition.

True, but even the easterners admit that few if any of the trees are skiable at places like Whiteface and much of NH. It's unreasonable to have binary arbitrary definitions of "all tree acreage skiable" and "no tree acreage skiable." There are gradations as illustrated by the examples above.

Blue Mountain in Collingwood, ON also., but pretty much up and down yoyoing.

Maybe so, but I'll bet it's a lot flatter than 4-1, thus amenable to adjustment to a more realistic number.

 

[Patrick]

So some reduction is in order vs. areas like that. The more difficult question is vs. areas like Whitefish/Baldy where the trees are there but widely spaced with more room for skiing than in Vermont. I really don't think this is rocket science. If trees consume half of a sector's acreage, the other half is what should be counted vs. a sector without trees.

Well, powder doesn't track as fast when it is tucked away in tight trees or places hard to reach.

What is acreage of Las Lenas? Just the terrain above Marte is mostly rocks with a bunch of couloirs. Yes, the best snow was in the tight spots and hard to get to places.

Oh yeah, that first line is skiable from Marte without working to hard....great snow, a lot of windblown powder + the best total. Yes, this was the best day snow wise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaNs_HFlzw

 

[rfarren]

Tony, skiable woods are in the eye of the beholder. You and I have a different definition. I'd imagine that J and I would have a different definition.

True, but even the easterners admit that few if any of the trees are skiable at places like Whiteface and much of NH. It's unreasonable to have binary arbitrary definitions of "all tree acreage skiable" and "no tree acreage skiable." There are gradations as illustrated by the examples above.

Whiteface's trees aren't skiable because there often times isn't enough snow to cover the shrubbery and junk. I don't think that it's the space between the trees that make them impossible to ski. If whiteface got an extra 60 inches of snow a year, a lot of the terrain between the trails would be very skiable, granted you're comfortable in tight spaces.

 

[J.Spin]

As JSpin notes, we did thoroughly explore the acreage/size issues here: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1650 . I wonder now how he would compare Lost Trail to Bolton or Mad River?

I’m glad you brought this up, since back when we had that first discussion, I hadn’t previously though too much about ski area acreage, and we’d been in Montana for five years with only occasional skiing in Vermont, so my feel for Vermont ski areas was a little distant. In addition, while I’d skied Bolton Valley numerous times in the preceding 20 years, I was still just an infrequent skier there. Having now spent three seasons with Bolton Valley as my home mountain, my perspective is different in some respects.

I think that many people who have skied at a specific mountain day in day out for a number of years know what I mean in the way that your perspective of the mountain changes. There’s something different about passing by a clump of trees along the side of a trail, vs. passing by that same clump of trees knowing there’s a dozen acres of great terrain sitting behind it. Even if you cruise on by and it’s not even on your hit list for the day, if you know it’s there, you know it’s there. Imagine now that this experience is repeated at nearly every chunk of terrain between every trail on the mountain all day long – that’s the way in which perspective can change when you get to know a mountain’s terrain very intimately. I think that to some degree this phenomenon, along high levels of efficiency and convenience in ski outings, is a factor in making people stick to one resort, even when there are other equivalent options around. I know that the topic of skiing so much at a single area has been curious to some of the wanderlust folks, so that might explain some of the attraction on the other end. The more that a ski area hides these secrets (assuming they are there) from plain sight, the more dramatic the difference is going to be in terms of how an everyday local perceives a mountain vs. a casual visitor. There’s obviously a continuum for this effect among different ski areas.

So how did this affect my perception of Bolton’s size back in 2006? Even though I didn’t know all the intimacies of Bolton’s terrain, I assumed (especially with the Deslauriers growing up there) that it was like the rest of the Northern Vermont areas and had mostly skiable terrain between all the trails. With that in mind, back in 2006 I felt that Bolton was a small/medium resort relative to what I was used to in Vermont, and in that post, I placed a few Vermont ski areas in categories:

Small: Cochran’s, Suicide Six
Small/Medium: Bolton Valley
Medium: Smuggler’s Notch
Medium/Large: Stowe
Large: Killington, Sugarbush

So now in 2009, I think what has changed most is my sense of the nuances of Bolton’s in-bounds on and off piste terrain, and the enormity of the sidecountry/backcountry. I think my sense of Bolton’s in-bounds scale has changed a little bit, in that I’d never really spent much time over in the terrain off the Wilderness Lift, and there’s a lot more area there than I knew. But overall, it still feels similar to Lost Trail, and I’d suspect its size is somewhere in the range of what Lost Trail reports (800 acres).

So with regard to Mad River, it’s interesting to think that somehow its acreage is in the range of Lost Trail/Bolton. I didn’t mention Mad River Glen back in 2006, but I think based on my scale above, if I put Smuggler’s Notch (1,000+ in-bounds acres according to their website) in the medium category, I certainly would have put Mad River Glen in that category. Even though Mad River Glen is compact, its 2,000’ vertical drop makes it ski on the big side – clearly a nod to the way Tony says that vertical or steepness changes the feel of a ski area.

Although Tony didn’t ask about Stowe in the text I quoted, I’ll make a quick comment about the feel of Stowe since I mentioned it in that 2006 reply. Having not visited Stowe for many years at that point or done any hard calculations on its acreage, I estimated Stowe’s in-bounds area to be in the 1,500 – 2,000’ range. I guess I wasn’t totally out to lunch feeling that Stowe had ~2 to 2.5X Mad River Glen’s acreage, although now that I’ve been back there skiing more frequently it’s easy to understand how the numbers come out to about 3X the acreage of Mad River Glen. Perhaps Stowe should actually go in the "large" category in the relative ski area size list that I have above.

I realize that there are some additional responses I’ve got to get to in this thread, but I’ve just got to fit them in when I’ve got the time.

-J

 

[Tony Crocker]

My gut reaction is that the off trail acreage in Vermont should be counted at about half vs. open acreage with no trees like Alpine, Kirkwood, Alta. So Stowe, with ~500 acres trails + 2,000 acres woods comes to an "adjusted" 1,500. The objective is of course to have formulas that would fit the informed opinion of advanced skiers familiar with multiple areas. This would make Stowe about 3/4 of Alpine Meadows, which strikes me as about right. Alta feels noticeably bigger because many of its fall lines are much steeper than 4-1.

So with regard to Mad River, it’s interesting to think that somehow its acreage is in the range of Lost Trail/Bolton.

I strongly suspect that's true. But the single is less than 3-1 so it skis much bigger.

Imagine now that this experience is repeated at nearly every chunk of terrain between every trail on the mountain all day long – that’s the way in which perspective can change when you get to know a mountain’s terrain very intimately.

This has occurred to me, and raises a question in my mind that I might overestimate the places I have 1+ million vertical (Mammoth, Snowbird, Mt. Baldy).

The more that a ski area hides these secrets (assuming they are there) from plain sight, the more dramatic the difference is going to be in terms of how an everyday local perceives a mountain vs. a casual visitor.

Red Mt. is Exhibit A. Anyone going there the first time (james) MUST take a free guided tour. And if they can see you know what you're doing, it will be a very different experience from what you might have experienced elsewhere.

There’s obviously a continuum for this effect among different ski areas.

This is what leads me to believe that I don't overestimate Mammoth that much. The steeper half of the mountain is nearly all above tree line and very visible. Snowbird has a lot of open terrain, but I'm still finding new lines there after 60 days and 1.28 million vert, and my opinion of its size has increased over the years. Mt. Baldy clearly has a learning curve, but with 800 acres I had probably seen everything skiable from the lifts without a hike by 1983. Baldy is an area that would make a very useful comparison for the Vermonters, but of course hardly any of them have skied there.

 

[J.Spin]

Now I really know I have to tread carefully having skied Stowe one day. I'm sure JSpin has done an accurate job of measuring boundary-to-boundary. I've checked the chair ratios from trail maps and Stowe is indeed near the mainstream 4-1 ratio while Mad River is somewhat steeper. So that would narrow the gap a little bit. In both cases the real issue is how much of the terrain between trails is skiable. I know JSpin with his skills is going to say nearly all of it, but I'd like a bit more elaboration.
1) Are Stowe and MRG essentially the same in how much of the woods are skiable?

With the knowledge that roughly everything in bounds at Stowe is skiable by appropriately-skilled individuals as Marc indicated, it’s sort of splitting hairs to say there’s much of a difference between the percentage of in-bounds terrain that is skiable at Stowe and Mad River Glen. But for the sake of numbers, if I was to use a similar 80-90% skiable number like I mentioned before for Stowe (probably leaning a little toward the high side since much of Stowe’s in-bounds terrain is below that zone of dense evergreens) then maybe I’d give a few percent extra to Mad River Glen. To really get a feel for whatever subtle difference there is, one would probably have to know both mountains far better than I do, but Mad River Glen might have a slight edge for a couple of reasons. Mad River Glen has sponsored work days (as they did this past weekend) for sprucing up the off piste areas, and since the overall in-bounds area is much smaller than Stowe’s, it’s easier for a group of individuals to take care of a larger portion of the terrain.

2) Am I right in assuming that proportion would be considerably lower at Killington?

While I’ve been to Killington many times, most of those trips were in the early and late parts of the season, so I only have a limited number of days experiencing the whole mountain in mid-winter form. Geoff would obviously be a much better person to comment on Killington’s tree skiing, but in my somewhat limited experience, I think the percentage of the treed terrain that is skiable is not that much less than Mad River Glen/Stowe. I say this because I can recall one midwinter day at Killington (March 10th, 1999) where it seemed like we could ski just about any section of trees that we wanted. Here’s a quote from my report on that day:

“There were plenty of tracks in the woods throughout the day, but there just weren't enough woods skiers to track things up too heavily; if you wanted to stay in the woods you could go untracked forever. You gotta love that about the big K - it's big.”

Perhaps the fact that they’d just received two feet of fresh blower for that outing made the trees more skiable than usual, but the trees were clearly skiable in the vein of what I’m used to farther north. With that in mind, I was thinking that the increased snowfall up at Stowe and Mad River Glen might provide better coverage to push them ahead of Killington in terms of skiable trees, but Mad River Glen and Killington receive similar annual snowfall, so I’m not sure if there’s much to that. Hopefully Geoff will chime in with his thoughts.

3) I would also like JSpin to compare to Lost Trail or maybe some western area that I might have skied. Whitefish/Big Mountain perhaps we have in common. That's one of the elite tree skiing areas IMHO, which even amateurs like myself would consider boundary to boundary skiable.

NOTE: Now that I’ve finished writing up the response to this question, I realize that it could serve as a good source of information for anyone interested in Big Mountain in terms of “tree skiing”, or even just for people that want to get a general idea of what the mountain is like.

It’s interesting that you consider Big Mountain an elite tree skiing area. In terms of all the places I’ve skied, I tend to think of Red Mountain as setting the standard for “tree skiing”, and I’d never really gotten the impression that tree skiing was something people even focused on at Big Mountain. I’ve heard of people throwing out Jay Peak and Steamboat into the “tree skiing” category, but not Big Mountain that I can recall. That’s my casual impression from afar at least, although clearly Big Mountain has plenty of excellent tree skiing available.

Now in terms of up close, first-hand experience, I’ve done enough tree skiing at Big Mountain to have a feel for a lot of the resort’s terrain, so that’s clearly a good place to discuss for comparison to Stowe. My impressions come from two separate Big Mountain visits: one in February 2003, and one in February 2006.

Only about one third to one half of Big Mountain’s terrain (they indicate 3,000 acres in total) is really open to any great degree, and the rest of the mountain is cut trails surrounded by fairly dense trees that are on par with, or even denser than the typical off piste terrain one would find in Northern Vermont. That’s why I was surprised when you considered Big Mountain an elite tree skiing area, but even more surprising was that you considered it boundary to boundary skiable. In my experience (I’ll flush out the details below) very few people ski Big Mountain boundary to boundary, and it’s no big stretch to say that anyone who could ski Big Mountain boundary to boundary would have no trouble doing the same at the typical Northern Vermont areas.

As I mentioned above, only the top half of the mountain’s front side and the top half of Hellroaring Basin, the areas that come across as the resort’s marquee terrain, are what I would consider very open. A portion of it I wouldn’t call tree skiing per se, since it’s just so open. That’s the stuff in the center of the resort on the front side, probably the top ¼ of vertical, which you can see in the full shot from below, and a close up shot of the Toni Matt are below that:

That terrain is really fun, I’m just not sure I’d call it tree skiing. Any individual’s definition of “tree skiing” is very subjective of course.

If you look above at the full Big Mountain photo again, you can see that surrounding that general Toni Matt area, and in the next ~¼ of the vertical descent, there’s a variety of terrain with open trees. That area certainly offers of up some nice, moderately-spaced tree skiing. But, below those elevations on the front side of the mountain and Hellroaring Basin, and in all but a small portion of the back side (Bighorn area) the trees are easily of a typical (and in some cases higher) density relative to what one would find off-piste in deciduous or mixed deciduous and evergreens at the Northern Vermont ski areas. If you consider all that densely-treed Big Mountain terrain skiable, then you are easily in the same camp as those of us that consider essentially all of the typical in bounds terrain at the Northern Vermont resorts skiable.

Let’s start by taking a look at the map of Big Mountains’ back side:

Of course the image is just an artist’s rendition, but they do a reasonable job of showing what the terrain is like in terms of relative tree density. The trees are shown as being a bit sparser around the Bighorn area (top of the map around the middle), which is appropriate. The Bighorn area is the exception I spoke about on the back side with regard to tree density. I’m not sure if the trees in that area were thinned, or if that is just the way they are naturally, but the tree density is less there. The white areas shown on the trail map at the top of Stumptown and Window Pane (off to the left in the map above) would suggest some treeless terrain, but in my experience that’s not the case. I’ve spent a lot of time dropping off both sides of the peak(s) they show in that area; it’s one of my favorite parts of the resort and we’ve found that it holds some of the highest-quality snow due to elevation/exposure, so we know it well. Here’s an except from my 2003 trip report about the first time we dropped into that area:

“Just off the back of the lift, to the skier's left of the Lode Eye Ridge trail, we ducked into the trees. What we found was as good, or better, than we could have hoped. There were a variety of tight tree lines that were quite steep, somewhere between 30-40 degrees.”

I did call those tree lines “tight” back then (clearly subjective), but that should provide at least a sense of my “tree skiing density scale” with regard to viewing the images and video below.

Here’s a typical shot from dropping in right at the top of the Stumptown area:

And here are a couple more images, typical of the terrain/vegetation one sees when they descend probably 50-100 vertical feet in the Stumptown/Window Pane areas:

That sort of terrain is very reminiscent of what one finds on the upper parts of Mt. Mansfield (not the alpine areas, but just below that). I personally haven’t really done a lot of photography in those regions so I don’t have any images of my own to past in here, but some good reference photos from the Famous Internet Skiers are in their reports below. In the first link there are a few shots focusing on big drops near the beginning of the series, and some alpine stuff near the end that aren’t as relevant, but there are numerous shots throughout the series that give one a sense of the terrain/vegetation up there:

http://www.famousinternetskiers.com/tri ... t-coast-tr

Some additional Mansfield shots can be found in this report:

http://www.famousinternetskiers.com/tri ... to-be-home

The only other part of Big Mountain’s back side that really deviates from the typical tree density is that large region of white that they show on the trail map. I pasted the map in again below for reference. The areas of interest are seen in the center of the map near the bottom, and then an actual photograph taken close up in that area is shown below that:

I’m not sure if it was fire, or logging, but something clearly went on in that area to change makeup of the forest.

Finally, for another good look at the trees and terrain on the back side of Big Mountain, we have a video from our 2003 trip, comprised entirely of footage in the Stumptown/Window Pane areas and below (those areas really had the only good combination of untracked to moderately tracked snow/terrain that we found that day):

http://www.jandeproductions.com/2003/bigmtn03.mov

The only areas that one sees in the video that are dramatically open are the trails, and that area of re-growth in the middle of the map. Other than that you’re talking about a tree density very much like what you’d find between the trails at many ski areas in Northern Vermont. There may be a few areas down below Stumptown and Window Pane that were thinned out too. It certainly felt like there were a few areas that were more open and may have been part of an old access road or something, but it was hard to tell with winter snowpack. The comparison of density may be difficult for some, since it’s essentially all evergreens at Big Mountain, and a mixture of areas with hardwoods, hardwoods and evergreens, or all evergreens in Vermont, but they ski very similarly for me. In the video, we don’t have any shots from off to the skier’s left of the back side (the trees around the Kodiak, Caribou, and Gray Wolf trails), but the tree density is similar to or slightly more dense than what is in the video. We didn’t spend more than a few runs over there, since it turns out that the terrain below the top part of Bighorn is relatively flat (you have to make up for Bighorn’s very steep pitch somehow) and as I said the trees are a bit more dense down there. Here’s a quote from my February 2003 report regarding that terrain:

“Our group did manage to get split up as we explored the flatter terrain around the Caribou and Gray Wolf Trails. We followed a few tracks one of a snowboarder, but essentially the terrain was just too flat to move. It would actually take pretty firm conditions to keep moving in many of these woods; with any sort of powder you've got to shuffle along.”

That excerpt doesn’t speak directly to the density of the tree skiing, but since the terrain is flatter, the slightly increased density relative to the other half of the back side wasn’t a big deal. The slope was the most notable feature, but the trees were certainly dense enough to get everyone quickly out of eyeshot of each other.

Next, I’ll talk about the Hellroaring Basin portion of the resort’s terrain. The Hellroaring Basin area starts out with the type of very open slopes that I described above with regard to the front side of the mountain, with relatively steep areas like Sling Shot and Picture Chutes. But, as indicated on the map below, about halfway down, the trees all become very tight.

Here’s an excerpt from my February 2006 report that describes our very first experience in Hellroaring Basin:

“As we approached the Sling Shot and Picture Chutes area, we could see a lot fewer tracks in the snow below us, so we eventually dropped in. The terrain at the top of that area is really quite steep, and we skied a sweet chute in there that unfortunately had a bit of ice in it below the new snow. Lower down we found some untouched powder shots in the trees, but all the terrain in the basin began to funnel together into the Glory Hole and Hell Fire trails rather quickly. I commented that it was like suddenly switching from skiing the trees at places like Sugarbush, where you typically find plenty of untracked powder, to skiing the glades at Jay Peak, where the snow is often packed out into hard bumps unless there had been a recent snowfall. It seems that Hellroaring Basin funnels so much terrain into one basic trail, that the traffic is just a bit too much to maintain a really soft snow surface. E totally agreed with my analogy, and it made me wonder what the lower section of Hellroaring Basin would be like when snowfall was sparse. We eyed a lot of untracked snow off to our left in the bottom of the basin, but my ski sense suggested the reason it was untracked was because the area was just too flat for powder skiing. So, we stuck to the groomed run, and as I'd find out on our next run, we'd made the right choice.”

In addition to the terrain being somewhat flat in that area around the Glory Hole and Hell Fire trails, the trees were also very dense, even denser than much of the typical off piste terrain at Stowe. This type of rather dense forested terrain covers the entire bottom half of the Hellroaring Basin area, as depicted in the map below:

Because the conditions were rather poor in the more open, upper reaches of Hellroaring Basin as I mentioned above, E and I ended up staying down in the bottom of the basin and riding the Hellroaring Chair (where the snow was protected – presumably from the sun - and in much better condition). Here’s how I described that area during our first run:

"While riding the chair back up, we could see that there were very few tracks in the trees along the lift line trail (which is somewhat appropriately named Purgatory). The further we rode up the lift, the more it seemed like a run through those trees would yield a bunch of fresh powder. Once off the lift, we headed to the skier's right of the lift line, and found fairly tight trees intermixed with small open areas."

Even then I described the trees as “fairly tight”, and remember from whose frame of reference this characterization is coming. There are some open areas in there as I mentioned, but overall the trees are really quite densely packed. There were various areas were the trees were very tight, even too tight. I can distinctly remember one zone at the very top in the trees off to the skier’s right of Purgatory where I simply had to straight line it for a while because the trees were so tight, and I believe I even had to hop back on the trail momentarily because there was just no getting a decent line. The bottom line is that all that huge chunk of terrain surrounding the Hellroaring Chair, and throughout the bottom half of Hellroaring Basin, features some pretty tight trees. Below are some images from the area for reference. I got shots in the biggest open area we found during our exploration, but pay close attention to the spacing of the trees in the background of all those shots because that’s what the bulk of the terrain was like:

I don’t really have any images from most of the trees in that area because they were really just too dense and dark for great pictures/video. There’s a reason there were few if any tracks in that whole expanse of terrain: even though the quality of the snow was some of the best on the entire mountain, the trees are very dense and it’s probably difficult for most people to ski in there. If it was considered dense and challenging for two born and bred Vermont tree skiers, then I’d argue the trees are fairly dense. These dense trees cover the entire lower half of the mountain, including the bottom half of the front side, so I’ll finish my description of the mountain’s tree skiing terrain with Big Mountain’s front side.

Starting from the top, the front side of the mountain again features that open terrain gradually getting tighter as one descends, with the bottom half of the mountain being populated by more typical “cut” trails surrounded by fairly dense trees. Here’s the map:

We didn’t spend any time on the lower part of the front side of the mountain in 2003 because it was simply dust on crust, but in 2006 we spent an entire afternoon with Ty in the area of the Tenderfoot/Easy Rider/Heaven’s T-Bar/Swift Creek lifts, so we got to experience that area fairly thoroughly. Like the rest of the lower mountain, the off piste areas there were pretty densely forested and I don’t recall being able to hop around in between the trails very easily. I don’t have any shots readily available from that area, but in the picture below showing Ty skiing in the Village Chair area, you can see some of the slopes of the lower mountain and what the density of the surrounding trees looks like:

I don’t care who you are, those trees a the top of the picture are pretty dense, especially with the pitch of that terrain (although the shot may make the terrain look a bit steeper than it actually is). With regard to the Village Chair terrain itself, there were a few chutes off the sides of the trails that we played around in with Ty, but we certainly couldn’t just pop off the trail and ski the woods easily. The trees were pretty dense.

A unique area of Big Mountain’s front side is the Bigfoot T-Bar, which you can see in the upper right corner of the front side map. In our 2003 trip, we skied lap after lap after lap up there, because it was one of the few areas of the mountain that actually had good snow, and essentially the only good snow we found on the front side. The terrain is treed, with a density a lot like the Stumptown and Window Pane terrain off the back side. We spent so much time there because of the somewhat low traffic, and the fact that we loved the terrain and tree spacing (think Red Mountain). I certainly wouldn’t call it extremely open terrain, but it’s very nice tree skiing.

I’ve only got one more quickly-accessible image of the front side – it’s from our only run down the front side in 2003 at the end of the day. The image should be from the Russ’s Street area about halfway down the mountain. Again, look at the density of the trees in background off the side of the trail, I’d argue that the spaciing of those trees are pretty darned dense:

So back to the idea of Big Mountain being skiable boundary to boundary – I think this is true for the most part for someone with the appropriate skills, but anyone actually skiing Big Mountain boundary to boundary has got some well-developed tree skiing skills and is going to be fitting through some VERY tight spaces – especially for the bottom half of the mountain’s front side and the bottom half of Hellroaring basin. Someone tackling that terrain would have no problem skiing the off piste at a typical Northern Vermont ski area – at least based on tree density alone. Steep pitches and cliffs on the other hand, now they are another factor that can limit one’s ability to ski the off piste and require some different/additional skills.

I would contend that 1000 wooded acres at Stowe/MRG probably contain at least twice as many trees at 1000 acres at Whitefish. Thus usable ski terrain is lower in Vermont, and I would invite JSpin to speculate in what proportion.

I think it’s clear from the above analysis that this isn’t the case, certainly for the majority of the terrain at Big Mountain/Whitefish. I don’t think there’s any question that the upper one third to one half of the mountain’s front side is more open than any unattended terrain you’re going to find in Vermont, but beyond that I’m just not seeing the difference. Then there’s the issue of counting trees. I’m not sure what the numbers are, but I would contend that counting trees isn’t going to cut it for a comparison of how treed terrain is going to ski. While a birch with a two-inch diameter trunk and a spruce with a two-inch spruce may have the same footprint, the foliage envelope is dramatically different, especially as far as tree skiers are concerned. First off, the birch’s foliage is gone in the winter, and second off, most if not all the branches are 20 feet up in the air anyway, with just a two-inch diameter trunk sticking out of the ground below that. Contrast that to the evergreen, where you often have dense foliage low to the ground (depending on the species of spruce, fir, pine, etc.). For different ski areas with tree populations that are identical monocultures, counting trees might be a useful method of comparison, but in most cases it’s going to be more complex than that.

-J

 

[jamesdeluxe]

After one of J. Spin's book-length posts (and beautiful pix), I feel like I've actually skied the mountain he's talking about. =D>

 

[jasoncapecod]

Great post , but man o man it takes a long time to load all the pics and graphs..

 

[Tony Crocker]

I tend to think of Red Mountain as setting the standard for “tree skiing”

Agree 100%. But I've always considered Fernie, Whitefish and Schweitzer in the same family/climate zone.

JSpin's experience at Whitefish is far more extensive than mine. Interestingly, my 3 days there were 1/31, 2/1 and 2/6 of 2003, not long before his first trip. The first 2 days had rain affected snow on the lower half of the mountain.

I don’t think there’s any question that the upper one third to one half of the mountain’s front side is more open than any unattended terrain you’re going to find in Vermont

Due to conditions we stayed high and that undoubtedly contributed to my impression. If you look at the right of the front side map (mostly single black lines that dump into Russ' Street), that whole area skis very similar to Red/Fernie in terms of both pitch and tree spacing.

It seems that Hellroaring Basin funnels so much terrain into one basic trail

We noticed this also. Sling Shot/Picture Chutes are great terrain but they face mostly south. Good with some new snow that last day, but not reliable day in/day out.

my ski sense suggested the reason it was untracked was because the area was just too flat for powder skiing.

I would think this might be an issue on the lower half of Killington's vertical vs. the more sustained pitch at Stowe or MRG.

The most common pattern at western areas is to have scattered well spaced trees for a limited vertical below timberline (often only 500 or so) then dense below that. Jspin's detail shows that Whitefish fits this pattern except that the "well spaced part" goes on for 1,000+ vertical. Good, but not in the class of Red, Fernie or Steamboat where it's 2,000+.

For different ski areas with tree populations that are identical monocultures, counting trees might be a useful method of comparison, but in most cases it’s going to be more complex than that.

Definitely agree. Fernie's evergreens are spaced because the spaces are full of low alder bushes that usually get buried before January. SoCal's are spaced because the summer climate is too hot and dry to support any more density. Steamboat is a mystery to me, because in most of Colorado the transition zone of vertical with good tree spacing is very short IMHO.

 

[Harvey]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaNs_HFlzw

Patrick...what was the pitch on that slope and how wide was it at it's narrowest?

 

[Patrick]

Patrick...what was the pitch on that slope and how wide was it at it's narrowest?

I didn't ski it, but the one of the couloirs next to it. Someone confirmed what I thought, the first part of the vid is Sin Salida (No Way Out).

Here is what a 1995 book has to say about it. I bought the new book that just came out, but it stayed in the taxi. :evil:

An extremely dangerous couloir, The entrance is on the early part of Eduardo. It is relatively easy at first (40d) with good snow, but becomes progressively steeper (50d) with hard snow until an ice waterfall blocks the descent.

Bottom of run after traverse? Maybe Carne Cruda or elsewhere?

Descent I Carne Cruda, is very narrow and with a 50d slope.

Descent II Vegetariano is more diffult than I, being 1.9 metres wide. It is recommended to descend in parallel steps or perhaps by magical means

The second part part of the video is the backcountry, not the simple slackcountry. :wink: The book talks about 50 degrees.

 

[Marc_C]

Er, I'm not reading all of that. That's more than the mountain's marketing department puts out.
In a year.
Or two.
Is there a Cliff's Notes version?