Cannon Mt., NH 12/23/99

<I>(Note from the Administrator: This report was originally posted on 12/27/99. Due to our move to new servers, the date and time attributed to this post is incorrect.)</I> <BR> <BR>Cannon had only a few trails open; most of Peabody and two of the Zoomer slopes, along with Middle Cannon and Middle Ravine down from <BR>the top of the quad. They have two-for-one on Tuesdays and Thursdays; I showed up by my lonesome prepared to pay full boat, but the woman at the ticket window wouldn't let me; she insisted I go find some other singleton to buy tickets with. So I hung out there for a few minutes with no luck, until someone buying tickets for himself and his girlfriend gave me a half-off coupon (there seemed to be a lot of <BR>these around; I don't know what they were from). <BR> <BR>Ticket purchased, I was soon on my way up this spiffy new Garaventa quad. To my disappointment, they didn't use the suggestion in my First Tracks!! article and name it the Peabody Quad; it's the Peabody Express Quad. (Cannon has a fixed-grip quad on the upper mountain named the Cannonball Express; I thought they should be consistent and leave the "Express" out of the name of the detachable.) It starts in the same place the old Peabody lift did, but angles to lift-rider's <BR>left; the new liftline segments they've cut were still all stumps and branches, and while the old Gremlin liftline got made into a trail, <BR>its Peabody counterpart hasn't been. The lift ends in the upper part of the old Links area, which is almost unrecognizable; Middle Cannon <BR>has been greatly widened (with the help of a lot of explosives), as has Ravine. The area where Middle Cannon, By-Pass and Spookie come <BR>together has also been somewhat reworked (again); it took me a while to figure out what they'd done, made harder by By-Pass and Paulie's <BR>Folly Extension being closed. The widening of Middle Cannon required some embankment work above the end of Spookie, which the new quad goes right over, and between the lift cut and the steeper embankment it looks a lot different. <BR> <BR>The new Eagle Cliff Triple starts below and to the right (looking uphill) of the base lodge and ends on Lower Cannon across from the top <BR>of the Zoomer chair, and Lower Cannon has been fenced down the middle in order to separate upper-mountain traffic from beginner traffic. I <BR>imagine that, normally, the high-speed traffic would go down Toss-Up to get to Peabody base, but it was closed, so people had to either go <BR>down Gary's or Rocket (the only Zoomer slopes open that day), or duck the fence, which had been thoughtfully lashed up to make that easier. <BR> <BR>Skiing was limited to Middle and Lower Cannon and Ravine, Gremlin, the old Gremlin Chair liftline whose name I can't remember, Gary's, <BR>Rocket, and the Brookside beginner slope. All the cover was man-made and there were snow guns everywhere; the closed trails were stone bare. Conditions started out OK but got really scratchy by late afternoon; that combined with the limited terrain caused me to decide to knock off around 3. <BR> <BR>For no particularly good reason, I decided to do some scenic driving, and went up 93 to 3, then over on 302 and down through Crawford Notch <BR>to Conway, and back across on the Kancamagus Highway. It was lots of fun, especially Crawford Notch and the Kanc, but the traffic in North Conway and Conway was just ridiculous. I thought it'd be OK since it was midweek, but of course it was also two days befor Christmas. On <BR>the way through Lincoln back to 93, I got yanked over by a very nice local cop who let me off with a verbal warning. <BR> <BR>Incidentally, my lunch venue of choice at Cannon used to be the summit lodge, but now it's the little pub they've built into the "new" <BR>Peabody base lodge; they have really good pub fare and local microbrew for not much more than you'd pay at the regular cafeterias.