Bolton Valley, Vermont - March 17th, 2007

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The weekend of March 10th and 11th was sort of our off week for fresh powder in Northern Vermont, but Chris, Dave, and I had still found decent (albeit fairly dense) powder skiing on our backcountry trip to Bone Mountain on Sunday the 11th. The following week featured our biggest warm-up in weather since January, but fortunately Mother Nature was once again playing to the convenience of weekend skiing. Another big nor'easter was forecast to be in the cards starting Friday night. As many people had pointed out, the biggest region-wide storms for the spring also seemed to be following a holiday trend. Our previous big nor'easter about 10 events back had been nicknamed "The Valentine's Day Storm", and now this new one was poised to be sort of a "St. Patrick's Day Storm". That's when the theme of holiday storms really started taking off. People eventually began looking ahead to the next major holiday and joking about the potential for an "Easter Storm". Nobody was taking the idea all that seriously at the time of course, because the chances of a yet another major storm lining up with a holiday weekend were minimal. If people only knew that the "Easter Storm" alone was going to bring almost four feet of snow to the mountains in the northern half of Vermont, they probably would have been dancing a jig. But that's getting a bit ahead of things in the context of this report, so let's get back to the storm at hand. Prior to the St. Patrick's Day Storm, our snowpack in the valley had settled substantially with the warmer weather. So, in preparation for the upcoming nor'easter, I made a pre-storm snowpack report for easternuswx.com that Friday, and put together some pre-storm pictures on my web page. The data and text from the weather update is below:

Dave's cousin has a place in Stowe, so he was coming up from Boston to ski there on Saturday. I hadn't nailed down my ski plans for Saturday, but we planned to get together for turns at some point over the weekend. The incoming snowstorm began late Friday as expected, and at some point in the evening I got a call from Dave while he was on the road. It was getting late, and with the poor driving, he was thinking of stopping in at our place in Waterbury to sleep, before continuing on with the short Drive to Stowe in the morning. Once Dave arrived, we chatted for a bit, and began to get pretty psyched for the weekend's skiing as the snow collected outside. Before I headed off to bed, I took my first weather observations for the event:

The next morning, I took a snowfall reading at 6:00 A.M. and found that we'd picked up an additional 7.6 inches of snow, bringing us to 10.1 inches from the storm so far. Surprisingly, Bolton hadn't outdone us by much despite their higher elevation; they were reporting only 11 inches of new snow in the previous 24 hours. Dave had planned to get up early to head to Stowe, so I didn't mind rousing him and showing him the snowboard before I cleared it. The new accumulation of snow looked pretty enticing. Here are the data from the 6:00 A.M. morning weather/snowfall check:

With Stowe already reporting 18 inches of new snow, heading there with Dave for some turns sounded pretty appealing, but I decided it would be a good day to take Ty out for some powder turns, and Bolton would definitely be the best option for him. Dave headed off really early to catch up with his cousin in plenty of time for an early Stowe powder-day start, and we planned to get together on Sunday for some turns. I then shoveled the driveway, and the 7.6 inches were reasonably dry so it wasn't too difficult.

E had already decided that since it was a snowy day, we weren't going to bring Dylan out to the slopes, and she said she'd stay home with him. That meant it was going to be just a Ty and Dad day out on the slopes of Bolton. Ty is a master at lollygagging in the morning, but for once I wanted to get him up to the mountain before the standard lift-opening time of 9:00 A.M. We got Ty up and I let him know it was a powder day to get him motivated. He actually isn't as motivated by a powder day as some people, since powder skiing takes a bit of work for him and he already has plenty of fun on groomed terrain, but he knows powder is fun and he does get a kick out of making tracks. Whether all the powder day talk helped or not, Ty did a great job of getting ready quickly and we made it to the Timberline lot by 8:45 A.M., 15 minutes before the scheduled opening of the lift. I think that was my earliest morning start of the season with Ty.

There were about a half dozen cars in the Timberline parking lot when we arrived, and we grabbed one of the few spots in the central parking area right below the lodge. As I looked up at the Timberline lift, I was surprised to see that people had already been loading. In my previous experience at Bolton's main mountain, they had been pretty strict with the 9:00 A.M. loading time, but apparently there is at least some flexibility, so we'll have to take that into account in the future. The Timberline Lodge wasn't even open yet, and they weren't selling tickets, so we were glad we had passes. It was still snowing as we loaded onto the lift, but only lightly. While we rode the lift, Ty and I caught snowflakes on our gloves and examined them. The snow crystals were in the form of needles. I didn't think about it at the time, but as I recall, needles don't make for much loft in the snowfall the way some of the more complex hexagonal crystals do. I had no way of knowing if the needles were just something that was falling at that moment, or if they had constituted a major part of the recent snowfall, but they may have played a part in the density of the snow we found on the slopes. The powder we found in the trails skied like fairly average stuff in the 8-10% H2O range. It was nothing to scoff at, but with Ty being such a lightweight, he only sank in a few inches. Interestingly, even with my CMH fat skis on, the powder skiing was still pretty deep for me.

They had groomed part of Showtime under the lift, but there was nobody around so what they hadn't groomed was essentially untracked. I convinced Ty that we should do a run from the top, and as we passed over the Intro/Brandy Wine divergence, Ty liked the look of the terrain so we decided to head that way. They had groomed part of upper Brandy Wine as well, but we stuck to the ungroomed section and had some good powder turns. Ty seemed to kick into powder mode pretty quickly. After the junction, the snow cat/groomer had headed down Intro, so when we continued on Brandy Wine it was wall to wall powder. There were a couple of steep pitches for Ty, but he handled them pretty well and we were happy to have set down the first sets of tracks on the trail. It was a good long run full of untracked powder, and Ty had plenty of opportunity to play around with his powder skiing technique. The depths of the new snow varied a little bit depending on the wind exposure of the terrain, but I'd say that even down at the Timberline elevation range, we encountered snow depths that were pretty close to the 11 inches that Bolton reported. In line with the 10.1 inches that we had received down at our house in the valley, it seemed that the initial burst of snow from the storm wasn't extremely elevation dependent in our area.

When we loaded on the lift again, there was still nobody around, so we weren't too surprised to find that our tracks were still the only ones on Brandy Wine. Ty had liked the trail the first time, so we hit it again with the same results. By the third time around there was still only one additional track on the trail. I've been pretty impressed with Bolton's skier density over much of the season, but that outing really sealed it for me. We were moving at a four-year old's (and a photographer's) pace, and we still didn't have to worry about competition for fresh tracks. It was interesting to experience this phenomenon after skiing for several seasons at Lost Trail Powder Mountain in Montana, which seems to have a fairly low skier density. I still think Lost Trail has a lower skier density than Bolton, but after a year of consistently skiing at Bolton, I've found that the skier density of the two areas is actually pretty comparable. We were skiing on a powder Saturday in prime season and there was hardly anyone around. The snowfall wasn't exceptionally deep or light by Northern Vermont standards, but 11 inches still makes for a pretty good day. I guess a few people may have headed to other local areas since Bolton had one of the lower accumulations totals in their morning report. Or, maybe some people with limited ski time were waiting for Sunday, which actually turned out to be the main event of the weekend with deeper and lighter snow once the upslope kicked in. Whatever the reason, there were even fewer skiers on the slopes than usual. Ty and I, and a few others seemed to have the Timberline area to ourselves for much of the morning.

For our next run, we checked out Sure Shot, which did have a few tracks on it, and part of the trail had been groomed. Ty worked his way in and out of the groomed terrain on the right at times, and had a nice tumble in the deep powder off to the left. I stuck to the deep powder on the far left and had some great turns. It was sort of hard to leave the relative solitude of the Timberline area, not knowing what the crowds were like over on the main mountain, but there was some terrain I wanted to try with Ty over there, so we headed over.

We took the Vista Quad to the summit and checked out the Vista Glades that we had skied the previous weekend with E and Dave. I thought the combination of obstacles and contours had represented a nice challenge for Ty. Conditions were decent with the new snow, but it looked like the surface might have been pretty nasty before the freshening. Aside from the Vista Glades, there didn't seem to be too much ungroomed terrain off the summit for Ty, so we stuck with the Mid-Mountain lift and skied in that area for the next several runs. Ty got to check out the Enchanted Forest and there were still plenty of untracked lines in there that he could handle. We checked out the features in the Kids Primer Terrain Park, and Ty decided that he wanted to try them out. We accessed them via the trail below the Vista Quad, which was pretty much chowder at that point.

The first time Ty tried one of the boxes, he tried to get into a wedge to control his speed and crashed at the end. I explained to him that the surface was slick so he couldn't use it for braking. He just needed to keep his skis fairly straight and run in out. He seemed to get the idea and did better in his subsequent attempts. On the last run through the park, he skipped the boxes so that he could hit the big jump at the bottom, but he couldn't really get enough speed to catch any air.

For our final run, we did the long Cobrass combination from the Vista Summit all the way down to the Timberline Base. There was still a good amount of untracked snow on the edges of Lower Tattle Tale. I'm not sure if Upper Tattle Tale was closed due to the way the terrain can sometimes be scoured by the wind, but that may have helped keep the traffic on Lower Tattle Tale to a minimum. It had been a pretty decent morning for Ty. The altimeters had recorded 10 runs, with 7,555 feet of vertical on the Avocet, and 7,450 feet of vertical on the Suunto, a difference of just 1.4%.

We headed home sometime after noon and I took a 1:00 P.M. weather and snowfall reading:

It hadn't snowed too hard while we were out on the slopes, but it may have picked up in the afternoon because Bolton managed an additional 5 inches of snow on the day. This brought their daily total to 16 inches and their season total to 242 inches. The even better news was that the upslope snowfall was about to get cranking and Bolton was due for another 10 inches Saturday night and 12 inches on Sunday.

Dave returned to our place from Stowe after some après ski, and said he'd had a blast with his cousin. They'd reeled in over 24,000 vertical feet of powder-day turns, and all that skiing had certainly taken a lot of energy. We all headed off to my sister's place in South Burlington for dinner, and although it was snowing in the valleys, it wasn't raging the way it was up in the high country so the drive was decent. When we got back home, I took a new snowfall reading from the snowboard:

The snow was drying out as we headed into the upslope portion of the storm, and we were now up to 15.1 inches in the valley. I had to imagine the upslope was going off in the mountains, and Dave and I planned to see just how deep it was going to get the following day.

Ty chose the music for his ski video, and he wanted the track (Tiga's "High School Jamaican Boa") that Rage Films used in their ski movie "Corduroy", where the guys are doing snowmobile tow-ins to launch these huge kickers at Mt. Shasta. The video is available for download at the top of the report.

J.Spin