Cruising at Cascade: Winter’s Last Gasp?

“Don’t take off your snow tires yet,” my mechanic advised me. “It’s March. Anything can happen.” Sure enough, the following Sunday, snow started falling in Schroon Lake as I returned from rehearsal with Katye Kellye and The Interruption. I spent Monday, 11 March, clearing my driveway and an elderly neighbor’s driveway.

On Tuesday, I drove to Cascade Welcome Center. When I arrived, it was already above freezing. For all I knew, this might be the last ski of the season.

Cascade Welcome Center abuts Mount van Hoevenberg. In January 2022, the Adirondack Mountain Club bought Cascade XC from the Jubin family, its longtime owners.

The club continues to operate the ski center, and the lodge serves as — from their web site — “a year round outdoor recreation and information center” for the Adirondacks. One can buy trail maps as well as rent skis.

My introduction to Cascade was four cars ago, some time in the early 1990s. My former wife and I drove to Mount van Hoevenberg, which was hosting the nordic events of the Saint Lawrence Winter Carnival. It was -12 Fahrenheit, well below the FIS legal limit to run a nordic ski race. The athletes cheered when organizers cancelled that day’s races.

Meanwhile, we had counted on filling our water bottles at Mt van Hoevenberg’s lodge. But it was so cold that the pipes had frozen. We skied out Three Trails Loop to the connector with Cascade, found our way to the lodge, and begged for water.

In the intervening years, I didn’t ski much at Cascade. While Cascade abuts Mount van Hoevenberg, the two ski centers offer completely different vibes. Much as I like van Ho, it can be best described as a blunt instrument that beats you over the head. Cascade’s narrower trails have a more backcountry feel, not unlike Viking or Wild Wings in Vermont.

In the last couple of winters, Cascade has become a destination for locals. ORDA has focused on maintaining Mt van Ho’s World Cup trails, to the detriment of the trails cut for the 1980 Winter Olympics. In this low-snow winter, this might be understandable. In the winter of 2022-2023, there were several serious snowfalls where sections of the 1980 trails were inexplicably left ungroomed.

At Cascade, groomer extraordinaire Mike Battisti had done a great job with the eight or so inches of snow that had fallen Sunday night. Receiving the same amount of snow as the Olympic neighbor this winter, he’s done a slam-bang job keeping his trails buffed when ORDA couldn’t or wouldn’t groom the 1980 trails.

On this bluebird day, I clipped into my skis and set out. I’d crayoned one of the newfangled hard wax/klister blends on my kick zone. In sunny spots, it worked well. In the shade, it grabbed and I felt like I was riding a mechanical bull. I dropped in to a trail called Downton Alley and found my way to Marshmellow. A low part of the trail system, this trail wends alongside an expansive marsh. There’s a gazebo out in the middle, I’m not quite sure how one gets to it during the summer.

Although I’d grabbed a trail map, I didn’t consult it. I followed my nose to Beaver Run, skiing gradually uphill and back to the lodge. Downton Alley beckoned, and I went down again, this time bearing right onto Ridge Run, away from my first loop.

Eventually, I found my way to Flanagan’s Run. It seemed that the further I skied away from the lodge, the bumpier the trails got. Even the best groomers can only do so much with so little snow. Flanagan’s was bumpy as I wound uphill. Eventually I arrived the intersection with van Ho’s Three Trails loop. It looked to have been rolled, but no one had been on it.

I turned and headed downhill on Cascade, the most direct way back to the lodge. The screaming but smooth descents of the World Cup trails didn’t prepare me for dealing with bumps. They ate me up twice in a few hundred meters before the bridge over North Meadows Brook. Hey… if you don’t fall once in a while, you’re not going fast enough.

Back at the lodge, I ate my sandwich in the dining room. Although they no longer serve food or alcohol, it’s still a cozy place to relax. I chatted with Mike and with Jeremy, the welcome center’s manager. Jeremy had a hand in organizing the recent telemark festival at Mt Pisgah, where I’d caught up with Ripitz and Freebird at the beginning of March.

If you go to Cascade, be sure to bring your lunch and be prepared to have a good time.

Epilogue

As fate would have it, the gods graced the Tri-Lakes with two more storms after this was written. Returning from Massachusetts on a Wednesday afternoon, my life passed before my eyes. In the Cascade Lakes section of Route 73, with heavy windblown snow, a tractor trailer coming from Lake Placid lost traction briefly. Only about 50 meters away, I hit the brakes. How that guy recovered, I’ll never know.

The following Saturday, I drove to NJ for band rehearsal in yet another snowstorm. When NYDOT can’t keep up with the rate of snowfall, you know it’s bad. Eight cars in the ditch on the Northway. Anyway, we got six or so inches of snow. Enough to open the 1980 trails for a few days and freshen up the World Cup trails. Instead of the hard stops of the last few seasons, I’m looking forward to a gradual goodbye to winter this year.