Mary exiting the Stash at Bear Mountain

Mary exiting the Stash at Bear Mountain

As I write this the wind outside the inn is howling down the Killington Road. If one were not blinded by the dazzling sunshine that has blanketed most of the area today, you would think that we were in a really crazy storm... But actually, its been a pretty nice day!

The Killington Resort today was a study in weird contrasts for early February. The snow storm that dumped feet of snow in the front range of Colorado slid to the south of New England, transiting out to sea as a whimper somewhere in the Mid Atlantic states. Behind the storm, the atmospheric pressure gradients generated heavy winds and pulled down dry air from Canada to settle over Killington. In a normal winter, that dry air would have given us a temperature around -10 degrees. Today, the temperature us actually quite balmy, hanging right around the freezing mark.

The high winds were raising havoc on the mountain. The winds banging into Killington Peak from the north west created a compression cloud which was blanketing the top of the mountain. Killington Peak down to the area roughly defined by Great Northern cutting across Rhyme and Reason were in solid cloud, with cloud cover extending to just above the top of Snowdon.

The Bear Mountain side of the resort was beautiful and sunny, although it did not escape the wind effects. During our early morning excursion, we experienced high winds at the very top of the Sky Peak Quad. Most of the quad was reasonably sheltered, but getting off the lift presented challenges a couple of times.

In Needles Eye, the situation was even worse. According to the lift attendant at the top of Needles Eye, who came out to greet us, wind gusts at 50 MPH were hammering Skyship Stage 2, keeping it closed. On Needles eye, the chairs were swinging back and forth banging into the lift stanchions... clearly a safety hazard keeping that lift closed.

Without a new snow storm, ski conditions were basically more of the same...machine groomed loose granular over a hardpack surface. Most of the surfaces across everything we skied today were covered in an inch of 2 of loose granular. There were a couple of places where the wind was scouring the terrain down to the hardpack (like the top of Skyburst). There were a couple of other places where high traffic spots were still showing from the weekend, like lower Chute at Snowdon. But other than that, the conditions were basically flat and fast over groomed flat terrain.

Let it snow!!!