Jay Peak February 8-9

mitch28

New member
Jay wasn't in the direct path of the big storm, but their snow report was claiming 13 inches this morning, which seemed about right.

On Friday morning, we got to the hill only to find out that all of the Tramside lifts were on wind hold, so the Jet was our only option. They had picked up around 4 inches by the time the chair opened, and this wasn't nearly enough to hide the hard base. The glades looked tempting, but every time we ventured in our skis would scrape against ice, rocks, and stumps. As the day went on, skiers braver than us tracked out the woods, which packed down the snow. This, along with the continuous snowfall, made the glades much more skiable in the afternoon. We did a bunch of laps on Timbuktu, which still had some questionable coverage but was plenty of fun. We skied until 4 o'clock, and the still-falling snow made us optimistic for the next day.

On Saturday, we lined up for the Bonnie quad 20 minutes before it opened, landing us on the 12th chair up. Since Tramside had been closed all day Friday, those 13 inches were left to accumulate (except for tracks made by some hikers). For our first run, we skated across the ridge and dropped into Everglade. The first pitch was boot deep, but the base was felt on every turn. We were surprisingly much happier when the trail mellowed out, because we didn't have to edge as hard so we didn't scrape the base. Knowing that lower angle terrain would be better today, we went to Andre's Paradise, which was our best run of the day. The first couple of turns were rough, but the rest was full-on chargeable. I didn't cross a track the whole way down, and we didn't see another soul in there. Unfortunately, the masses must have been 5 minutes behind us, because when we went back on the next run it was completely tracked out. The rest of the day was mostly soft snow in the trees with pockets of untouched. Canyonland was in great shape, although I came pretty close to falling into a stream. Vertigo had some nice spots, but it was mostly icy. Timbuktu was similar to yesterday afternoon, but the extra layer of snow meant that my skis escaped (mostly) unharmed. We did a few laps in some unnamed Stateside glades that had a surprising amount of untracked snow considering it was later the afternoon.

Overall it was a great 2 days. The base took a beating from last week's rain, but this storm was a big step in the right direction. The steeper glades had some coverage issues, and the Face was as bare as I'd ever seen midwinter, but, after 2 weeks of hardpack/ice, it felt great to be on real snow again.
 
Nice.

I'm sure that others skied more southerly hills that got more of a direct hit from the storm but we've only heard from you and Anthony at northern destinations. Bueller? Bueller?

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