By Albert Neubert
CATSKILL PARK – It was a glorious weekend of skiing and riding featuring bluebird skies and comfortable temperatures, leaving last weekend’s arctic weather a distant memory. Snow conditions remain challenging following another week of warm and wet weather and limited snowmaking windows only over the weekend. Still, ski area operators made whatever snow they could to spruce up conditions for the surprisingly strong turnout this Super Bowl weekend.
With snow surfaces primarily groomed frozen granular, your best bet is to get out early and take advantage of the firm corduroy before heavy skier and snowboarder traffic chews it up and turns it into loose granular with hard back and raw ice bases getting exposed in between. I like to describe it as piles of fine sand on a linoleum polished base. These conditions, which have been typical for most of this season, require twice as much effort and means you will tire in half the amount of time you would under ideal snow surfaces.
This applies to all levels of skiers and snowboarders but especially so for novice skiers and riders. Their technique is not advanced enough to consistently use the edges on their skis or board so they tend to slip and skid much more. The result is green circle terrain becoming even more challenging as the frozen granular piles up into decent sized moguls with glare ice in between. Steeper, black diamond-rated slopes can actually be easier to ski or ride because skiers and snowboarders on that terrain tend to carve more.
I ventured west into the southern Catskills to Belleayre, one of the three Olympic Regional Development Authority (ORDA) operated ski resorts in New York — the other two being Gore and Whiteface in the Adirondacks. Belleayre was the first ski area to open this season in our region and among the first in the entire Northeast, even beating out perennial early opening resorts like Windham and Hunter.
How was Belleayre able to open so early and with a decent amount of terrain, top-to-bottom, covering about 1,300 vertical feet? That was part of my mission, to see firsthand what the coverage looked like and across so much of the skiable acreage. Belleayre has consistently reported the highest percentage of open terrain in our region and with deep bases.
My timing was good given we just went through another period of rain and thawing temperatures. In fact, it was crazy warm when I pulled into the gondola base parking lot at 9:00 AM, with the temperature a balmy 48º F, which would be about 20 degrees warmer than the average high for that date. On my first ride up the gondola, I could see the natural snow was being vaporized by the warm, humid air, but the trails had solid coverage edge-to-edge. I took a first run down the intermediate rated Deer Run trail, and it had mounds of manmade snow that looked to be four or five feet deep and a consistent base of at least two to three feet.
I broke out my Atomic Vantage skis for the occasion since they are extra wide and perfect for spring conditions. Because Belleayre’s operations team made so much snow during the last cold wave, the surfaces were actually very smooth and pliable, rather than a heavy corn snow consistency more typical of spring skiing. I found the same across the entire trail network as I made way across the area from west to east. Every run was covered with the same deep base and fresh buttery surface.
When I arrived at the counterpart to Deer Run on the east side of the trail network, Roaring Brook, I was struck by the close spacing of the stick snow guns along the entire inside of the run, some being only fifty feet apart. I also learned that in the off season, Belleayre’s management replaced 60,000 (almost 12 miles) feet of new snowmaking pipe, added 300 new snow guns and a new compressor to push water and air through the pipes and to the guns. Basically, they added a new snowmaking system that would be many times larger than that of a Mount Peter, Thunder Ridge, or Holiday Mountain.
With that amazing coverage in such a challenging season, expect Belleayre to be a spring skiing mecca, staying open into mid-April if they can. Belleayre’s northwest exposure, which is the best possible, also means that the spring sun does less damage to the snow surfaces. It’s not unusual to see leftover snow on Belleayre’s upper trail well into May.
If you have a youngster that you would like to introduce to the sport of skiing, there’s no better way than to enroll them in the Holiday Mountain Ski Club. The Club is a season long program that has kids learning in small groups each weekend with their own instructors that teach the basics of skiing. What makes the program unique is the racing sessions on Sundays throughout the winter. It allows the children to develop their newly learned skills and then to test those skills on a racecourse on the area’s black diamond Roman Candle trail. For more information about the Holiday Mountain Ski Club, you can visit their Facebook page or you can call (845) 796-3161.
Be like a mailman; neither rain, sleet, or snow…and happy skiing and riding!
You can contact me at asneubert@aol.com or you can visit my Instagram page at asneubert.
