jamesdeluxe
Well-known member
- Joined
- Jul 17, 2020
There were eight inches at the base when we got there and it kept on snowing throughout the day.
Sutton's Director of Operations Luc Boulanger gave us a three-hour tour of one of my favorite ski areas. After skiing Jay and Sutton within two days, I had a chance to comparison shop, and it's silly to claim that one is better than the other, but I can safely say that Sutton has a completely different feel on several levels. It's too late for me go into it, but if you're ever in the area with snow coming down hard, stop at Sutton... on a day like this, it's nirvana.
We made the initial mistake of heading to the far skier's right, which has steeper terrain and where you'd bottom out every three turns (a recurrent theme on this trip -- the rain event from two weeks ago laid waste to Sutton's snow just as bad as everywhere else), so we got smart and headed back toward the mellower left half of the mountain, which was approaching knee-deep and soft as could be.
During lift rides, Luc gave me a graduate-level course on Sutton's tree management methods. You wouldn't believe the amount of thought, work, and resources that are involved in maintaining Sutton's natural appearance.
He started by distinguishing between "sous bois" (glades, which is what Sutton provides) and tree skiing, which is basically skiing wherever you can find an opening in the woods. As I understood it, he and the Sutton crew are concerned about people who do the latter and are skiing over saplings, which prevents the forest from re-generating. It starts a vicious circle of open spaces, which result in wind damage, erosion, and an increasingly fragile forest. Yesterday evening, we had dinner with Marketing Director Nadya Baron, who can talk about Sutton as enthusiastically and untiringly as Luc.
Sutton's Director of Operations Luc Boulanger gave us a three-hour tour of one of my favorite ski areas. After skiing Jay and Sutton within two days, I had a chance to comparison shop, and it's silly to claim that one is better than the other, but I can safely say that Sutton has a completely different feel on several levels. It's too late for me go into it, but if you're ever in the area with snow coming down hard, stop at Sutton... on a day like this, it's nirvana.
We made the initial mistake of heading to the far skier's right, which has steeper terrain and where you'd bottom out every three turns (a recurrent theme on this trip -- the rain event from two weeks ago laid waste to Sutton's snow just as bad as everywhere else), so we got smart and headed back toward the mellower left half of the mountain, which was approaching knee-deep and soft as could be.
During lift rides, Luc gave me a graduate-level course on Sutton's tree management methods. You wouldn't believe the amount of thought, work, and resources that are involved in maintaining Sutton's natural appearance.
He started by distinguishing between "sous bois" (glades, which is what Sutton provides) and tree skiing, which is basically skiing wherever you can find an opening in the woods. As I understood it, he and the Sutton crew are concerned about people who do the latter and are skiing over saplings, which prevents the forest from re-generating. It starts a vicious circle of open spaces, which result in wind damage, erosion, and an increasingly fragile forest. Yesterday evening, we had dinner with Marketing Director Nadya Baron, who can talk about Sutton as enthusiastically and untiringly as Luc.
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