Whiteface 2/11/01

Jimski · Feb 12, 2001

What a difference a week can make, or for that matter even a day. This past Thursday I was working on a simply gorgeous bluebird day and a little voice in my mind kept saying, "You should have gone skiing today, you know what weather is coming they say." Common sense kept telling me there would be more special days this season even if we go through a rough spell. That little thought still kept haunting me to take advantage of the now and worry about the future later. I should have listened. Today a friend of mine that works at the "face" informed me that "they" were open this past Thursday. He only heard it second hand and not until after the day was over. He heard reports of skiers going berserk, straight lining the icefall in waist deep virgin untouched all season powder. Wwwwaaaaaaaaa!!!!! I gotta get in on a tighter underground somehow. I wonder when they decided to open them; probably at 9:00AM. Well I was there today and it aint pretty. The website showed that everything would be open, or was yesterday. Not!!!!! A word to the wise, don't bank on the accuracy of either the Whiteface or Gore web sites. I have found them both to be erroneous more than once this season. The trail consistency most everywhere was that of polished granite. One thing I can say is where ever they had the guns blasting there was really sweet soft turning. This saved my estimate of the day from a two rating and it squeaked out a three. A two would have been- stuck it out, wished I had done something else. A one is -get to the parking lot, look it over and split or not more than one run and outta there. The snowguns made it interesting enough to stick around and do it some more. The whole summit was closed including the connector and lower cloudspin. The gondola had only started around 10:15 or so I heard, I had gotten there around 1:00. Any wind of 30 MPH or more will auto shut it down, it kept almost stalling all afternoon. Finally they stopped riders at 3:15. So I got four runs off Little Whiteface and one off the Mt. Run lift. The cold wasn't too bad skiing but that one ride up the lift was enough to give me a frostbite scare. Northway, Essex, Lower Northway and Upper McKenzie were all closed off the top of Little Whiteface leaving only Excelsior for a blue square and although there were no bare spots it was a bowling alley. There was also a race happening on Parkway and it looked like the racers really were grooving on the rock hard surface. If you look at it from an optimistic point of view there was as much or more decent skiing that the first couple of weeks in late fall. It was definitely better than a good day at work. Now that there is a nice solid base in the slides I hope we can get enough fresh snow without further bad spells to open them again. I would like to see this season return to riches. Jimski

Whiteface 2/11/01

Jimski

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