Today was an absolutely beautiful day, by any objective standard. Cold overnight, warming to 25 during the day. Not a cloud in the sky. Soft manmade snow all around, good coverage on almost all of the trails.
The big news at Gore today was the 2010 debut of Sagamore — the long, steep, liftline run that was added to the trail map last year. It’s a mile, with 1400 feet of vertical, and it’s serviced by a deluxe quad that takes less than nine minutes to deliver you to the top. More on that later.
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.
Jamesdeluxe has joined NYSkiBlog as an author. James began alpine skiing in his mid-30s following a move back to the northeast after, go figure, living five years in Colorado and four years in New Mexico. Because James puts a premium on the “vibe” of where he’s making his turns, he’s been known to pass over world-famous resorts in favor of smaller, under-the-radar ski areas. Since 2003, James has written for First Tracks Online, Snowjournal, and Alpine Zone.
James travels to the West or Europe to mix things up, but he’s an unapologetic champion of East Coast skiing and a perfect fit for NYSkiBlog. His avatar, above, was taken on Upper Parkway at Whiteface in mid-December 2009 after a 20-inch dump.
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