Funny that the below post mentioned deciding between hiking Jay or Kmart Thurs, as it happens I did the latter! Judging from your pics I got the better cover but hey a day of skiing is etc....
I went up figuring the middle section would be thin, if not broken, but that I would at least hike/ski the lower steep pitch (I think of it as the 'footwall') as it would be full of snow, not to mention have the advantage of being literally steps from the van. Well even my cynical self was shocked when I rounded the bend on the access road and saw a solid stripe of snow virtually unchanged from last week! To honor the trail's long tradition (hey, it's not the snows fault the lift is closed) I just had to hike all the way up for a top-to-bottom run before rehiking the bottom pitch a couple of times. There's a well kicked-in climbing line on skiers right but hiking up is really no prob regardless of line chosen.
Except for the very lip of the upper headwall, the coverage is absolutely perfect, thick and unbroken. The narrowest spot, the one that always breaks just above the 'footwall', is still a good 50' wide and most places are almost double that. The snow depth on the head- and foot- walls still has gotta be over 8', likely double digits in places, with the flatter middle section naturally thinner but still holding up great. There's almost none of that gap in the footwall that always comes in from skiers right and eventually makes the lower pitch a dogleg of sorts (we've called it the "DMZ" as the late cover at the bottom starts to resemble a map of Nam!). I didn't have a camera, but if you scroll to the pics in the "5-2/3/4" thread below for reference, Superstar's cover is *much* better than the shot from last year. Hell, even the snow back to the lift at the bottom is still servicable! In short exactly where it should be a couple of weeks before closing. A nice day in W MA, it was a little more overcast at K with some sunny breaks, the heating action of which touched off a couple of very brief/light sprinkles, and even a couple of bursts of very small hail pellets (almost snow-like), all of which were quite refreshing actually. I highly recommend grabbing some!
For all the signs of the soul of skiing slipping away to corporate homogenization in recent years (the ever later openings, the trail/lift count plummeting late season, hiking a fully covered mt after an early closing (which I did again this year at Snow)), I must say that the sight of an unbroken perfectly bumped Superstar in the spring with no lift running is the most pathetic yet. They should absolutely positively still be open. Someone said that ASC changed their opening/closing policy last year and that there's nothing new this year. Not true. Yes the openings have pretty well morphed by now (the "no opening until top-to-bottom" edict is purely to justify opening later) but there were a couple of major firsts this year: a) it's the first year in a quarter century plus that a closing date was decreed weeks in advance, regardless of conditions; and related b) it's the first time ever that they've closed Kmart with top to bottom cover (in fact, with more than one trail!).
My last two lift serviced days at K were last Tues and Fri. Tues was a day at the beach, at close to 80 degrees it was almost too warm but the snow was like buttah. Fri (the 13th!) was after one of those very cold nights so I didn't even bother showing up until mid afternoon, which was just about right as even then the caps of the upper headwall's bumps were pretty crisp (someone told me that some/all of Superstar was closed until noon) but it all softened up perfectly for the last coupla hours.
Two things worth noting from those last officially-open trips: First, the grooming was very subtle, nothing like last year. Then again, last year wasn't "grooming" so much as nightly bulldozing strictly to get the snow to melt faster so they could close, what with the land-for-debt swap imminent and they wanting to appear frugal to their overlords (never mind that a couple of weeks of spinning one lift has very little to do with their financial troubles). So what we actually had, after a quarter century of conditions determining the closing, was the exact opposite! Anyway, the lack of such brutal nightly tomfoolery this year simply confirms what most knew, ie that it had nothing to do with some imagined sudden call for table-flat grooming from the public. Even if one does accept there's some sudden great call for grooming (again I don't), the grooming this year was the way to do it, i.e. keeping the machines to one side so the trail fades from flatter to bumpier as you move from one side to the other. It should *never* be a question of one OR the other.
Also, the claim that they'd be staying open for "20 passholders" is BS. First off, I must as always point out that passholders ARE paying customers. Second, there were a hell of a lot of people there last week and plenty of them had day tix on. On the Tues I made a point of counting cars in the lot during the noon hour and there were a little over 100, which means far more skiers. On the Friday there were lots more cars, too many to take the time to count. Of course, they'd probably try to claim the good skier count was due to the grooming or "quality ski experience right up to closing" or some such nonsense, but the claim that they're trying to broaden their late season appeal would hold a whole lot more water if they were actually *advertising* the fact they were open! Even the video news release about Sunday River and Sugarloaf closing made no mention whatsoever of the fact that the same company still had an area open!! They ask "Why should we stay open?"- the answer is "For the same reasons you always did!". It's their football of course but let's call it what it is.
I won't pretend that my review will start a massive K thread as it did the last two years, mainly because the thread has already beeen going for awhile spread amongst multiple headers. Fact is that those old threads were a lot more than just 140 posts of complaining. They were/are a celebration of the fading tradition: reminisces about early/late adventures, folks digging out their old photos etc. Keep it coming. As for the exposure of tradition-busting practices and reasons and such, they'll just have to deal with it. After all, somewhere in some meeting someone said "We'll catch some flack from the hardore, but...." and we'd hate to disappoint 'em!
I went up figuring the middle section would be thin, if not broken, but that I would at least hike/ski the lower steep pitch (I think of it as the 'footwall') as it would be full of snow, not to mention have the advantage of being literally steps from the van. Well even my cynical self was shocked when I rounded the bend on the access road and saw a solid stripe of snow virtually unchanged from last week! To honor the trail's long tradition (hey, it's not the snows fault the lift is closed) I just had to hike all the way up for a top-to-bottom run before rehiking the bottom pitch a couple of times. There's a well kicked-in climbing line on skiers right but hiking up is really no prob regardless of line chosen.
Except for the very lip of the upper headwall, the coverage is absolutely perfect, thick and unbroken. The narrowest spot, the one that always breaks just above the 'footwall', is still a good 50' wide and most places are almost double that. The snow depth on the head- and foot- walls still has gotta be over 8', likely double digits in places, with the flatter middle section naturally thinner but still holding up great. There's almost none of that gap in the footwall that always comes in from skiers right and eventually makes the lower pitch a dogleg of sorts (we've called it the "DMZ" as the late cover at the bottom starts to resemble a map of Nam!). I didn't have a camera, but if you scroll to the pics in the "5-2/3/4" thread below for reference, Superstar's cover is *much* better than the shot from last year. Hell, even the snow back to the lift at the bottom is still servicable! In short exactly where it should be a couple of weeks before closing. A nice day in W MA, it was a little more overcast at K with some sunny breaks, the heating action of which touched off a couple of very brief/light sprinkles, and even a couple of bursts of very small hail pellets (almost snow-like), all of which were quite refreshing actually. I highly recommend grabbing some!
For all the signs of the soul of skiing slipping away to corporate homogenization in recent years (the ever later openings, the trail/lift count plummeting late season, hiking a fully covered mt after an early closing (which I did again this year at Snow)), I must say that the sight of an unbroken perfectly bumped Superstar in the spring with no lift running is the most pathetic yet. They should absolutely positively still be open. Someone said that ASC changed their opening/closing policy last year and that there's nothing new this year. Not true. Yes the openings have pretty well morphed by now (the "no opening until top-to-bottom" edict is purely to justify opening later) but there were a couple of major firsts this year: a) it's the first year in a quarter century plus that a closing date was decreed weeks in advance, regardless of conditions; and related b) it's the first time ever that they've closed Kmart with top to bottom cover (in fact, with more than one trail!).
My last two lift serviced days at K were last Tues and Fri. Tues was a day at the beach, at close to 80 degrees it was almost too warm but the snow was like buttah. Fri (the 13th!) was after one of those very cold nights so I didn't even bother showing up until mid afternoon, which was just about right as even then the caps of the upper headwall's bumps were pretty crisp (someone told me that some/all of Superstar was closed until noon) but it all softened up perfectly for the last coupla hours.
Two things worth noting from those last officially-open trips: First, the grooming was very subtle, nothing like last year. Then again, last year wasn't "grooming" so much as nightly bulldozing strictly to get the snow to melt faster so they could close, what with the land-for-debt swap imminent and they wanting to appear frugal to their overlords (never mind that a couple of weeks of spinning one lift has very little to do with their financial troubles). So what we actually had, after a quarter century of conditions determining the closing, was the exact opposite! Anyway, the lack of such brutal nightly tomfoolery this year simply confirms what most knew, ie that it had nothing to do with some imagined sudden call for table-flat grooming from the public. Even if one does accept there's some sudden great call for grooming (again I don't), the grooming this year was the way to do it, i.e. keeping the machines to one side so the trail fades from flatter to bumpier as you move from one side to the other. It should *never* be a question of one OR the other.
Also, the claim that they'd be staying open for "20 passholders" is BS. First off, I must as always point out that passholders ARE paying customers. Second, there were a hell of a lot of people there last week and plenty of them had day tix on. On the Tues I made a point of counting cars in the lot during the noon hour and there were a little over 100, which means far more skiers. On the Friday there were lots more cars, too many to take the time to count. Of course, they'd probably try to claim the good skier count was due to the grooming or "quality ski experience right up to closing" or some such nonsense, but the claim that they're trying to broaden their late season appeal would hold a whole lot more water if they were actually *advertising* the fact they were open! Even the video news release about Sunday River and Sugarloaf closing made no mention whatsoever of the fact that the same company still had an area open!! They ask "Why should we stay open?"- the answer is "For the same reasons you always did!". It's their football of course but let's call it what it is.
I won't pretend that my review will start a massive K thread as it did the last two years, mainly because the thread has already beeen going for awhile spread amongst multiple headers. Fact is that those old threads were a lot more than just 140 posts of complaining. They were/are a celebration of the fading tradition: reminisces about early/late adventures, folks digging out their old photos etc. Keep it coming. As for the exposure of tradition-busting practices and reasons and such, they'll just have to deal with it. After all, somewhere in some meeting someone said "We'll catch some flack from the hardore, but...." and we'd hate to disappoint 'em!
