joegm
New member
Loon on tuesday was groomed out pp and hardpacked all over.. they are still only at about 30 of 50 or so... temps were a reasonable 20 or so till about 2pm when it dived to what felt like 0 in about 45 minutes. they got about 2 inches mon night into tues and it was flurrying all day on tuesday which got them about 3 more. only becasue of the dearth of natural have my buddy and i refrained from going into the office and asking about the mogul run on a blue, but it appears they are reneging on thier promise of either rampasture or blue ox...at the bottom of the rampasture there was a 40 foot long section with about 7 man made bumps and an absorption type tank set up.. it looked like a drunk cat operator had a little fun, but not exactly sure what was going on there... who knows , if they ever get any real snow this year maybe they will havbe some bumps, but nothing as of now...that whole mountain is groomed flat from tree line to tree line. the snow that was not scraped off was actually pretty good considering the nightmare condtions from the previous 2 weeks, so they did a nice job trying to fix the mess... did not even bother looking at their little tree lines up top or down bottom, since we were trying to psych ourselves up for k and outer limits and vertigo on wed and tried to burn turns in the flats as much as possible <BR> k on wednesday...k didn't appear to get any significant new snow ( probably about 8 total since this past saturday ), other than the fake on the outerlimits, which we figured would be bumped up after 3 or 4 days. so after 10,000 flat turns all day at loon, we made the brutal drive over this morning... knew it was gonna be cold but figured if we could ride the stage 2 skyship , we would be all right with the same line down vertigo that we skied last week.... in hindsight , we should have known we were in trouble when we had to keep the heat on it's highest blowing level in my buddy's NEW rodeo ALL THE WAY TO KILLINGTON FROM LOON... 110 MILES !!!!! ( AND I AM SOMEONE WHO BECOMES IRRITATED WHEN THE AIR TEMPS GO ABOVE 70 F ) we made a mistake... big time!!!!! 1) it was colder today than last week, even with the sun out and blue sky... k1 gondy had the base at minus 22 and the top at minus 33 without wind factor.... 2) it was so cold, the hydralics on the stage 2 skyship froze and it did not open, much to our horror, as it was the only access to vertigo ( pretty much the only reason we drove over ) ... the conditions were the same as last week , when we felt that the only possible way that any sustained skiing could be done in the cold was to ski a bump line and try and generate heat... the bear quad ( where we set up out of today ) was running, but the lines on bear were over our head in terms of trying to ski properly with proper technique... massive fake powder mounds with about 10 foot stretches of ice in between... from where we are at right now , that's ok if the pitch is not too bad... but OL is too steep for us without ideal snow, so that was out... wildfire off of bear hsq was junk, not as steep, and it had bumps for about half of it, but not enough to keep us warm.... with out the skyship 2 , we had no access to vertigo without riding 2 lifts , one of which being the k1 which required a long flat run to get to vertigo, and it was just too cold to ski that flat run... tried one more thing and threw the gear into car and drove over to ram's head to try the novice glade run right off the rams head q... it's still not recommmended with good skis, and today, while what it had in it was sparse but sweet snow, the run was not enough to keep warm when factoring in a non gondy lift ride back up.... k1 gondy was not an option to us because of the amount of flat skiing involved to get to any sort of pieces of bump runs.. it was just too cold to ski today, guys , it don't know how else to put it.. the place was deserted like i have never seen k before...by the time we did all of the above, it was about 1pm, and we threw it in at that point...this is the coldest 2 week ski period that i have ever seen and today was, without a doubt , the coldest day i have ever ( tried ) to ski...for the record on k, it looked like they picked up and added to the base slightly from 4 days prior , but it's still pretty paltry. the half pipe under the k1 was up and looked ready to go, but no one was ever near it. the groomers all had perfect superdry somewhat sticky pp... it appears the next 2 days are much of the same if not worse....if u r out turning em in the next 2 days, u r one sick bird in my book... next week from loon and probably k again on tues and wed