The weather service foretold copious amounts of snow falling on Wednesday. We believed the forecast and made plans to skip work to ski the pow on Thursday.
Good thing we did!
We had a lot of fun skiing in 10 inches of light, new powder at Smugglers' Notch Resort in northern Vermont. (They reported receiving 19 inches of snow over the last four days.)
We hopped on the Madonna I double chair soon after it opened and we skied off that lift all morning. The line didn't get too long, luckily.
We enjoyed powdery turns on some of our favorite glades and trails. We played in Upper and Lower Doc Dempsey's, Burmuda Glades, the Shire, Shakedown, Knight's Revenge, Three Mountain Glades and more. There were also silky smooth packed-powder turns to be had on Upper Chilcoot.
99% of the trails were open with mostly packed powder and powder conditions. A few ledgy, icy areas here and there were scraped off quickly (a stretch on Shuttle, for example).
We heard hooting and hollering as we rode the long lift to the summit of Madonna Mountain at 3,640 feet. Many people took advantage of the new snow on the rugged Upper Liftline in the morning.
But we like to head for the glades where things are usually pretty quiet and snowy. All around us the tree branches were encased in snow. It was lovely.
There isn't a super-deep base so far this season so we did bump into low obstacles hidden under the snow as well as hobble-bush. We leaned back a bit to help our skis ride over these things.
Did I mention the sun came out as we skied? Today was a tasty treat!
Smugglers’ Notch Resort, Vermont, at a Glance
- 8 lifts: 6 doubles; 2 surface lifts
- 2,610' vertical drop from top of Madonna to the Village
- 78 trails
- Novice: 19%
- Intermediate: 50%
- Advanced/Expert: 31%
- 300 acres of marked and patrolled acreage
- Additional 700 acres of unmarked and unpatrolled terrain
- 5 terrain parks and 1 learn-to-snowboard park
- 62% snowmaking capacity
