Vermont Photo Gallery

advertisement

"Mt. Snow for cruisers" is essentially a redundancy. Mt. Snow is a cruising mountain by definition. Ego-boosting, too there's even a trail called Ego Alley. Almost every trail on the front side is within view of a lift, so if showing off is part of your gestalt, Mt. Snow is really your kind of place.

As I've said, Mt. Snow was one of the first ski areas in the East to begin cutting its trails extra wide, to the point now where some of its trails are divided by lines of trees no more than one row deep. Little woodsy, narrow-trail skiing here.

The archetypal Mt. Snow trail is Exhibition, the lift line beneath the Yankee Clipper Quad. It's a top-to-bottom, wide-open blast straight down the moderately pitched fall line. Just ride your skis through big, giant-slalom turns. It's got a couple of rolls to it that kids seem to avail themselves of for those tips-up kind of jumps that only kids seem to make. It's fun but popular a highway full of skiers on a weekend day.

To me, a more interesting cruise combination is Upper Canyon or Upper Choke to Snowdance. Both of the"Uppers" are narrow by Mt. Snow standards and much less skied than Exhibition. If there has been a wind, you can sometimes find fresh snow blown in on them. Snowdance, by comparison, is anything but narrow it's one of the widest trails on the mountain made interesting by lots of rolls and hummocks, both natural and artificially created. It also seems to get a little less skier traffic, partly because it's a little bit out of the main trail system.

If you're looking for fresh bits of snow (groomed or powder), Mt. Snow can be a fun place for poking around. Between the Standard and Yankee Clipper lift is an entwined trail system that skis more like a series of snow chambers separated by tree islands. The trail names are Ledge, Lodge, Choke, and Standard, and it's hard telling which one you're on, but if you do enough poking, there's a good chance you find yourself in one small chamber that's hardly been skied. The other side that is, the side to the left of the Yankee clipper quad as you disembark is strictly open cruising. If Exhibition or Ego Alley is well occupied, swing over through South Bowl to Sundance. It's a trail combination that isn't quite as flush to the fall line as are Exhibition and Ego Alley, but they're so wide that you've got a pretty good shot of finding good snow near the edges.

For my money and time, the Sunbrook area, on Mt. Snow's southwestern flank, produces some of the best cruising on the mountain. The runs are short and skewed toward the easy side in fact, one of the hardest things about Sunbrook is poling across the flats from the main summit to the Sunbrook summit. What I like about Sunbrook in addition to the fact that it soaks up the afternoon sun is that that terrain, in less than 1,000 vertical feet, features more variation than you'll find on the front side of the mountain. Trails like Little Dipper and Thanks, Walt wind their way to the bottom in a succession of undulations, narrow at times and wide-open at others. because a relatively small percentage of Mt. Snow skiers find their way over here, a sense of calm that's hard to find on the front side pervades Sunbrook. If you want to get away from the crowds, Sunbrook is your best chance short of going to Haystack.

Speaking of crowds, one of the keys to enjoying the front side of Mt. Snow is good lift-line management. You basically have two summit lift choices the Yankee Clipper Quad and the Summit Triple. Even if the Quad line is more than twice the line at the triple, get in it. Simple math: the lift carries 3,000 skiers per hour compared with the 1,800 by the triple. And once a la quad, you're just eight minutes from the top, compared with 14 minutes on the triple. If both lines are monstrously long, the Sundance triple gives you almost as much vertical footage and invariably has a shorter line. And if that strategy fails, you can get some pretty good skiing off the Standard or Ego Alley doubles, where lines rarely get very long. My preference would be Standard, since it puts you onto trails more out of the mainstream of skier traffic.

© Article copyright Menasha Ridge Press. All rights reserved.