jamesdeluxe
Well-known member
- Joined
- Jul 17, 2020
The good news: Plattekill got about eight inches of bone-dry blower pow. The bad news: There was no base on the natural snow trails -- and not a hyperbolic “no base,” but literally NO BASE. It’s been a tough year for the Catskills with the constant thaw/rain/freeze bollox, and I guess that the last warm-up nuked Plattekill, which doesn’t have many snowguns.
As we were waiting for the double chair to open at 8:45, a patroller skied down and said, “OK, we’re opening everything, but coverage is VERY THIN.” She wasn’t lying. Good on PK for letting people pick their poison instead of roping everything off, but a lot of the turns were a scrapefest. Too bad, as you can see from the pix of Jason, it would’ve been beautiful with just a bit of something to keep us from bottoming out. We made a handful of runs, then decided to head over to Belleayre at 10:15. Belleayre got the same amount of fresh snow, but it fell on a big base. As long as you stayed on the blue sections, it was nice and soft, but the steeper pitches up top were loud and scratchy.
Plattekill (and nearby Bobcat) is the way I like my ski areas. It’s so cool to detoxify yourself from the resort BS with these no-nonsense places. Both hills get extra points for having grazing cows and other rural accoutrements on the access roads. The trade-off, of course, is on a day like this, where our EC weather calls the shots. Oh well, we both ate our Plattekill day tickets, but wrote it off as a contribution to the little guys who try harder.
Plattekill: Jason on Freefall
Plattekill: Jason on Northface
Belleayre: Me on Pepacton
Belleayre: Jason on Seneca
Some say that Plattekill is Mad River Glen with about 35% of their snow fall. Actually, Platte gets well more than half of MRG’s yearly snowfall, but it suffers through a lot more ugly, base-killing episodes. I don’t even recall Bobcat, which has zero snowmaking, being open with such thin cover. But hey, this is what makes us the most hardcore skiers ever.
As we were waiting for the double chair to open at 8:45, a patroller skied down and said, “OK, we’re opening everything, but coverage is VERY THIN.” She wasn’t lying. Good on PK for letting people pick their poison instead of roping everything off, but a lot of the turns were a scrapefest. Too bad, as you can see from the pix of Jason, it would’ve been beautiful with just a bit of something to keep us from bottoming out. We made a handful of runs, then decided to head over to Belleayre at 10:15. Belleayre got the same amount of fresh snow, but it fell on a big base. As long as you stayed on the blue sections, it was nice and soft, but the steeper pitches up top were loud and scratchy.
Plattekill (and nearby Bobcat) is the way I like my ski areas. It’s so cool to detoxify yourself from the resort BS with these no-nonsense places. Both hills get extra points for having grazing cows and other rural accoutrements on the access roads. The trade-off, of course, is on a day like this, where our EC weather calls the shots. Oh well, we both ate our Plattekill day tickets, but wrote it off as a contribution to the little guys who try harder.
Plattekill: Jason on Freefall
Plattekill: Jason on Northface
Belleayre: Me on Pepacton
Belleayre: Jason on Seneca
Some say that Plattekill is Mad River Glen with about 35% of their snow fall. Actually, Platte gets well more than half of MRG’s yearly snowfall, but it suffers through a lot more ugly, base-killing episodes. I don’t even recall Bobcat, which has zero snowmaking, being open with such thin cover. But hey, this is what makes us the most hardcore skiers ever.
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