Smugglers Notch, VT: 2/7/10

Hopkins Bridge

While it’s all about families at Smuggs (almost suffocating at times, and I’m a parent), the terrain really impressed me. It’s a good-sized mountain — a legitimate 2,600 vert covered by old-school EC terrain with lots of character, some steep shots, and skiable trees everywhere.

Harveys

Smuggs reminds me of a bigger version of Magic Mountain, including the outdated infrastructure: vintage double chairs and an undersized, out-of-date lodge at the bottom of the main hill. I can deal with slow lifts, but I’m kind of puzzled by how they’ve managed to avoid updating the uphill capacity while courting a demographic that insists on a certain level of amenities.

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Jay Peak, VT: 2/6/10

I’m in northern VT for the weekend on my way to several days in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Left my office in northern NJ at 6 pm last night. Stopped to send some e-mails at the best highway rest stop in all of North America: the one on northbound I-81 in Guilford VT, just before Brattleboro.

By 11 pm, while driving past White River Junction, I was falling asleep at the wheel, so I pulled off, drove into a church parking lot, cranked the seat back and fell asleep. Woke up at 3 am, and I’m pretty sure that it was near zero outside, and not much warmer inside the car. In my 20s, I used to do the sleep-in-the-car routine occasionally, but I’m getting too old for this crap. It’ll take me two spa treatments for my neck and back to recover.

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Belleayre Mtn, NY: 1/23/10

With Jason e-mailing all sorts of gloom and doom prognostications for our upcoming NCP event (he seems to LOVE to convey bad meteorological news), I felt that I should get in one more trip before our day of reckoning arrived. So up I went to the Catskills, which are still in the same weather mode as the last time I was there one week ago: dry, sunny, seasonal temperatures.

Belleayre got five inches on Monday, but it didn’t do much to improve things — any trails that hadn’t been snow-gunned recently were hard and fast. It was especially disappointing to head down Cathedral Brook, which was so beautiful last Saturday, and find that the snow had stiffened considerably. But on the positive side, Belleayre Run was in perfect shape and the bumps on Upper Seneca were soft and succulent.

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