Stowe Jan 4

P

powderfreak

New member
Today is Friday, which means Jumpin' Jimmy and Scotty D would be at the mountain and its always a good time with those two. We are going to have to wait for more powder skiing after this thaw. Both of those thoughts went through my head and convinced me to head up to the mountain today. This was the third straight awesome ski day I've had this week. Hopefully tomorrow will be day four.

The mountain continues to dish out phenomenal skiing off-piste. We mined one area off the gondola all day long. Many, many thousand vertical feet of snow-filled hardwoods were skied today.

Here's the summary in pictures...
http://tinyurl.com/28vw6k
http://tinyurl.com/2guj3t
He smiles.
http://tinyurl.com/yqcnen
Scotty in awe at the amount of snow in the woods.
http://tinyurl.com/2dggvl
Then ripping the single-track as the snow off the path was too deep for the pitch.
http://tinyurl.com/yrebsz
Jimmy rippin' the pillows.
http://tinyurl.com/24ym6x
And pow.
http://tinyurl.com/26ughs
http://tinyurl.com/yoet4r
Scotty D.
http://tinyurl.com/2fw4xe
http://tinyurl.com/236see
http://tinyurl.com/ytdz9t
http://tinyurl.com/2f6jg9
Overwhelmingly deep at times.
http://tinyurl.com/228scf

-Scott
 
UVM is monkeying around with their servers at the moment. Depending on when you tried to look at them, the pic links gave either a Not Found, Service Unavailable, or Access Denied error message.
 
jamesdeluxe":1w3vk6ir said:
How about just posting them here so we don't have to click a link?
8-[
Click to expand...
I've tried getting him to do that...unsuccessfully.
 
Pics worked fine for me....I think its probably a problem between the chair and the keyboard with the others ;-)

Scott as always you find the goods....way to get after it.

M
 
i can provide more of an on piste report to the powder freaks friday report as our crew was there as well....we don't ski the place enough and don't have enough knowledge to hit those chin clip glades yet ..my sense is if you make a mistake, you are on rt 108 ...a one day trip cannot take that chance
we started out off the gondy and chin clip,,,, it was groomed out...not quite sure why, :twisted: , but it was....disturbing as it was at least 50% of the reason we went there....one run put us over to spruce ( over my objections but i was outruled / outnumbered by some dreamers in the crew )...one run over there found uppersmugglers with more bumps relatively speaking, than clip but still relative junk...whatever :roll:
back over to the main hill and the quad and it was recon of the front four...80% liftline was scraped off junk.. bottom part had stretch of kind of tight bumps on bottom...goat and starr junk on top 15% but very good via the cut in's on liftline and national...national itself was junk on top and not bad on the middle or i guess what they would call lower... the last part of goat and lookout had the best lines overall for those trails... the quad started jammin up so we bailed out to the triple and lapped hacketts and the gulch for the tightest, best bumps on the hill all day...
glades of note we grabbed were nosedive and tres amigos... real thin on the nosedive bypass which i assume will be gone by mid week if the forcast holds up....nosedive itself was sheet metal garbage till the bottom half ...

stowe rules for sure...but even they are part of this incredible ignorance industry wide on bumps... example= the live interactive trail report has the toggle feature of highlighting various terrain features.. ie groomed, bumps, whatever....they have gulch not marked as with moguls,,,in fact it had the best moguls on the hill.. why was it not marked... my guess is that whoever is running the web site is one of these typical ski industry insiders with the attitude of any bumps not on black diamonds don;t really count or matter :roll: in fact if you highlight the gulch trail description it talks about how it seems to be a policy of having blue bumps on it.. but it doesn;t show that on the interactive... the interactive showed chin clip with bumps.. there were none...interactive has bumps on whirlaway and upper smuggs... none on whirlaway and not really on upper smuggs...i know this is a waste of time as no one in general gives a s*#t about skiing moguls on a consistent basis... our crew has finally accepted that...but there is no reason stowe can get the report right every day...i don;t expect anything legit from phony mountains like loon / waterville/ cannon and those places... but stowe show get it right.... the other thing that they ought to do is take all their talk about a new :" freestyle " park at spruce and make it a real truly well rounded freestyle park and put in a public comp mogul course of 2 or 3 lanes wide and of a real length .... not some sorry ass mogul field of 15 or 20 b umps like under liftline at the bottom...stowe hosts a couple of mogul comps each year and each year the course gets built with real moguls on a perfect spot at spruce and down it comes 24 hours after the little team members get to ski their comp on the weekend... do they tear down the halfpipe after the halfpipe comp leaves town.. of course not that would be ridiculous... just as ridiculous as putting up some good bumps and taking them down right after the privledged kids get to ski em...how the hell are people supposed to ski the goat and starr effectively if they can't learn on easier terrain....how the hell are people supposed to try and perfect their turns for the goat and starr if they can't practice on better terrain....the answer is obvious after seeing some of the clowns and jokers in the forementioned front four...they don't...they are just side slippin and scapping off the snow and ruining the fragile lines that are in there....there is a public race course on gondolier... there are half pipes and rails and jumps ( big and small ) everything else that gets fixed every night...but no maintained public mogul course :bs: :bs: ...the jerks running killington have one this year but it is closed to the public....i don't know what's worse, not having one at all or having one up and closing it to the public...it wouldn't take hardly any effort at all relative to the ridiculous money effort that gets put in to the other things on the hill for stowe to do it...but when you are an insignifcant piece of dust , non team member, non ski academy grommet regular shmo bump skier , i guess you can't even get that :roll: ridiculous...i'll ask it one more time.. what is the big deal about taking maybe 1/8 of 1% of the skiable terrain on the whole mountain and putting in some good left right moguls???? other than that it was pretty good
 
If Roemer could take me into those Chin Clip glades (which were mostly moguls when I was there), I'm sure joegm would have no trouble getting in and out of them.

I suspect powderfreak does not want to resize his pictures. That is the most tedious part of the job, though much less so than in the pre-2004 format.
 
Joegm...

Sucks that they groomed Chin Clip. I hadn't noticed but they groom that in two situations 1) To conserve snow, right before a thaw...and 2) Right before a dump. I'm not sure I agree with the before a thaw mentality but that trail melts out quicker than others in certain spots...so packing it in might prolong the skiing later this season. At least before a dump, it snows 1-2 feet and you've got moguls again.

I used to be a moguls guy, and still sort of am, though have definitely moved into the trees. There used to be more mogul skiing than tree skiing in New England back in the late 90's but now tree skiing has taken off. At Stowe, if Chin Clip is knocked down, there really is no true bump run except for portions of Starr, Goat, and Lookout usually. Hayride in the spring is one massive bump run but then again, most trails are moguls by late March when they stop grooming all but the main intermediate routes.

I'll definitely put in a word for some consistent moguls.

-Scott
 
scott,
the crew and i had a feeling u were at one point a`mogul skier... it's weird but u can just kind of tell after a while who gets it and who doesn't ...
we have no problem with selective strategic grooming and taking things down as long as it is for a good reason, which i have very little doubt at this point , stowe did have and after hearing your additional info, think it was the right move....one of our crew is just so disgusted in general with the industry and what they have done to kill bump skiing over the last decade that he just so suspicious of everything now...we came around the corner and it was just like W-T-F is going on.... his fear was they were just going to make the clip another flat to ski off the gondy on a regular basis.
it sounds like u have some in's over there .. any word you can put in would obviously be appreciated, but for the most part , our crew has accepted the idea that mogul skiing is dead and no one cares about it anymore...i still just wish i could get an explaination from a high level manager as to why they will set up a course for a comp over at spruce and then rip it down...
like you point out, and as only a real bumper would get and understand, if clip is not open, there really isn't any good SUSTAINED bump run to rip...the best run for that on friday was gulch and it's 25 turns at best....it's the single most frustrating thing that angers me the most about the whole thing...
thanks for your insights in general though.
J
 
I too am a mogul skier. I prefer the trees and powder now too and I find the mogul technique is not all that different than skiing the trees. In fact, having that skill set (and phat skis) really makes tree/powder skiing much more fun.

Early winter is not really the best for moguls, unless you ski at Mad River Glen. Because grooming is limited to the green trails, almost every other trail, including the blue squares is a mogul field. At big resorts like Killington and Stowe, they tend to groom everything out if it is cold. Most people prefer the groomers, so they make more trails skiable to the most people during the holiday periods. Surely they should have kept at least one trail bumped up...but they don't always do that. Even at Killington they groom Outer Limits on occasion when it is very cold.

Joegm, you could have saved yourself $40 and had more moguls than you can manage at MRG. Seems like you didn't get your $81 worth at $teaux. Too bad about Chin Clip.

Oh, and as far as venturing into the trees...there are usually enough tracks in Chin Clip woods that finding the egress onto the trail is not an issue. We've been much further out than that...like to The Bench. That was the farthest we had to walk back, and it only took like 10 minutes.
 
sharon i know what you are saying but we actually were at mrg on the day before...it was good... just not as good as advertised...the lines that WE have interest in skiing were a lot different, in a bad way, than they were when we were there on dec 17th...holiday crowds i suspect contibuted to this along with the cold changing the snow makeup ....it was insanely cold and they had done some grooming on lines ( which they may have had to , but maybe not ) that when we were there earlier this year , were not groomed ...in any event, we sat outside the bathrooms for 45 min trying to decide what to do... in the end we decided to take a break from the insane cold, the actually air temp hovered around minus 5 during the day and it was windy, and maybe ride the gondy at stowe... it didn't work out like we thought, but that's ok.. skiing is roll of the dice to a degree everytime you go to an extent...
 
Sharon said:
in fact having that skill set (and phat skis) really makes tree/powder skiing much more fun.
Click to expand...

and yes i agree with you on that for sure... we debated that issue here a while back , but you have it in the right order...if you can ski moguls well, you can ski trees with relative ease...not necessarily true the other way around...

what i don't agree with you on is the statement that early winter is not good for moguls generally....it takes 48 hours of snowmaking on a trail to get enough snow laid down to build some of those evil " man made " moguls on a course...it can be done.. it 's just a question of will
 
FWIW, yesterday at Greek Peak, there were no real moguls to speak of.

Olympian had bumps forming on the natural terrain, but it hardly gets enough traffic to call it mogul-skiing.

Would be nice if there were more moguls there too, but they seem to mow them down more than we'd like.

I know how you feel.
 
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