Mad River Glen, VT 1/17/04-1/18/04

[BD]

Got to Mad River on Saturday morning. A beautiful, sunny, not too cold day. The upper mountain was in pretty good shape -- icy in spots, and certainly plenty firm underneath, but with nice soft snow and windblown stuff on top. The cover was pretty good up there as well, though there were certainly rocks to be found. Chute, Cat Bowl, and Fall Line all had nice reasonably even bumps (Paradise was closed). The lower mountain was not as nice -- Grand Canyon was very icy, Lynx/Beaver and Liftline a bit thin. Glade was probably the best bet, at least early in the day, but also a mite thin. Very heavy snow in the woods, which were skiable but not hugely enjoyable (though some people seemed to disagree!) so I stayed on-piste most of the day. <BR> <BR>Sunday got a couple of great runs on the single early in the day. Chute/Liftline and Fall Line/Glade were both nice -- the couple inches of overnight and morning fresh helped each considerably. But just after I got off at the top for the second run, the single stopped. This was around 11:20 or so. It stayed stopped for a while, started for long enough to get all the people who were riding off (but they didn't let anybody else on) and then shut down for good(despite initially saying it would be back up by 2, and then by 3, and then by 3:30...) So I skied the double the rest of the day, but as the single was busted and it was a huge holiday weekend, the liftlines were around 25 minutes. So adding in the lift time, you could spend maybe 20 percent of your time skiing. The snow was really nice though -- soft and not icy at all, though everything was a bit scratchy up top. Supposedly the single will be fixed by tomorrow (1/19).