Slopesquad 16-17: How many days so far this season?

[Vinnie]

Day 1, 11/25, Mt Bachelor. Only the bunny hill lift open (Sunshine Accelerator). Still it was lots of fun to get some turns in.

 

[Vinnie]

Day 2, 11/26, Mt Bachelor. Pine Marten and Skyliner lifts were running. Limited terrain but more turns than Day 1. Snow quality and coverage surprisingly good. Lots of fun.

 

[Jilly]

3 days over this weekend. Opening weekend at Tremblant. Basically 3 runs, 2 faces to mid station. Fun thing was there was snow in the bush. Usually we only have man made, but there was some natural. Best run was the green, known as Petit Bonheur, aka little happy. Lots of race teams training. Flat light today resulted in a friend now sporting a broke collar bone and one busted Atomic Blackeye ski. He was asking about my Rossi Hero's. Just he'll need something now for sure.

 

[surfsnowgirl]

Day 2 Bromley yesterday. Mostly firm conditions with some crud here and there. 4 trails open. Tackled this one trail that gave me heartburn in the past. Not stellar conditions but just nice to be out there. Unless my mountain opens this weekend we'll likely head to Killington this weekend.

 

[dean_spirito]

Yesterday was day 15. First legit pow day of the season at Copper!! And it is still coming down! Another 1-2 feet in the forecast for the next couple of days.

 

[SkiNurse]

Day 8. First day at Copper. @Drahtguy Kevin @SBrown

 

[fullStack]

Day 1: 26 Nov @ Crystal Mountain

Our original plan was to get out for Crystal's opening day on Friday, but at that point I was still in the middle of a marathon ski tuning session. (The turkey must have slowed me down a bit.)

Both daughters got to try out their new skis, each pair being 20cm longer than last year's boards.
Despite repeated warnings throughout the week, hilarity ensued. Apparently when you tell a seven year old to "take it easy", she hears "get in a tuck, head for the breakable crust off piste, THEN try your first turn of the season".
Meanwhile, most likely peeved at the thought of little sister beating her to ANYWHERE, our nine year old had opened up her arcs, headed over a little roller, caught a 20cm-longer-than-she-was-expecting edge and slid (safely) into home plate.
Not to be outdone, my wife, with a little too much speed, attempts to pull up just short of where the seven year old is now doing snow angels, digs a tip, and augers ostrich style into the frozen crud.

I assure a passer-by that the situation seems to be under control, while emphasizing that I don't know ANY of these people.



Luckily the rest of the day was pretty awesome. The girls found their balance and starting arcing some pretty nice turns, and we found some really nice snow in places, although it was very thin at the bottom and on the ridge lines up top.

Overall, no injuries, good snow, huge nachos, cold beer and mega fun = great way to start the season.

 

[crgildart]

One!

 

[jmeb]

4 days in so far. All at Loveland. Last one really began to feel like winter for the first time with fresh snow, cold temperatures, my turns coming into form and Lexuses from Cali screwing up I70 traffic.

This weekend should see two days on skis. One of them is likely to just be skinning up a skin track and sliding back down it. Need to get my skinning legs back before my mid-January Aaire Lvl 1 3-day hut trip

 

[nay]

3 @ Luv. Cold. Light snow all morning, heavier in the afternoon. Good turns all day.

 

[jmeb]

One reason I will find it hard to ever not get a season pass to Luv is their warming huts. Throw a tin-foiled pb&j or tin can of soup on top of that wood stove and you have wonderful lunch ready in a jiffy. Add backpack beers and it is just the rustic experience I want when I'm skiing.

 

[nay]

One reason I will find it hard to ever not get a season pass to Luv is their warming huts. Throw a tin-foiled pb&j or tin can of soup on top of that wood stove and you have wonderful lunch ready in a jiffy. Add backpack beers and it is just the rustic experience I want when I'm skiing.

 

[Lorenzzo]

I'm on the board.....Day 1. But it was a kind of a weird beginning. I'm hoping it isn't any kind of sign for the coming season.

I got to Brighton just before opening and saw a couple of buds near the ticket window. So I put my skis in the rack behind me and took, literally, two steps to talk to my friends. After maybe two minutes I turned to grab my 2016 Head Titans....but they were gone.

It gets stranger.

I look around and find the same model of skis with the what looked like my poles two racks away. At first I thought I'd just forgotten I'd put them there but it doesn't take long to notice you're 180 length skis have shrunk to 163. So what happened? Did someone take the wrong ones and go skiing? Did someone want a longer pair and made the switch? Is a friend messing with me?

I figured it was inadvertent but what confused me was my poles were with the wrong skis. That made ill intent more likely. I waited there to cover the inadvertent possibility but no-one showed up. Next...solicit resort employees...put out the calll...head to the rental shop for demos and to alert them in case they show up there. On the way out I mentioned it to one more individual and bullseye. He said..."yeah...this guy came in a few minutes ago and said his skis fit fine yesterday but today his boots were swimming in the bindings...so we adjusted the bindings for him." While I was curious why it never occurred to anyone they were the wrong skis...I let it go.

With that info I was able to intercept the guy at a lift. Our poles were the same brand and length making all of this more possible. Now we both had the right skis and poles but the wrong binding adjustments so back we went to the rental shop. All of this took 2 hours.

I made him buy me lunch and sit with my group so he could take some well deserved abuse.

 

[jmeb]

@Lorenzzo -- crazy story.

Moral of the story though: more pugski stickers on your sticks will avoid this problem in the future.

 

[ErikL]

Two days for me so far.... Well, a day and a night. First day was at Rose, fun stuff teaching the gf to, um, snowboard. Then we realized how much it sucks to work all week and only ride on the weekends, so we got ourselves some night passes at Boreal. We went up the other night and had a blast sliding around for a bit. Hopefully day 3/night 2 will be tomorrow.

 

[MonkeyL]

4 days so far. All at Sunday River. Wednesday before thanksgiving through Saturday. There were roughly 5 or 6 open trails, but they were T2B. Never did more than about 10 runs in any day. Just enough to start to get my legs back. The snow and trail coverage was great. No complaints.

 

[Philpug]

FOUR..FOUR DAYS...HA HA HA

 

[SBrown]

Lucky seven

 

[SkiEssentials]

This morning at Stowe was 6 for me! Although if you add up our entire staff...

 

[Lorenzzo]

Day 2. Opening Day at Alta. It was....really good.

I brought my 2016 Titans as they're kind of my rock skis and I'm working on canting new Lange RX, but encountered powder all day mid calf to up to just below the knee. Might seem like the wrong tools for the job but I gotta say they were a blast. From Wildcat to everywhere else we skied, coverage and conditions were more like a midseason powder day only nothing hard, not rock nor frozen bottom were encountered.

I sucked and struggled to have fun Day 1, was breaking in new race boots, had the ski switch, etc. so today I wasn't expecting much. Well...it reminded me why I do this.