by Al Neubert
It was a glorious spring skiing Easter Holiday weekend with bluebird skies and mild temperatures throughout the Northeast. For many skiers and snowboarders it was the last hurrah for their season. There are only a handful of ski areas within daytrip range that will remain open for this coming weekend and for maybe another week. If you want to keep skiing and riding you will have to head to northern New York where Gore and Whiteface will stay open for another couple weeks.
Belleayre, in the southern Catskills, will be the lone local holdout, closing during next mid-week and opening for their final weekend on April 12 through 14. Hunter, in the northern Catskills, will remain open through Sunday. Berkshire East, in Northern Massachusetts, will be the next closest ski area and from there the southern Vermont areas will all be open this weekend. That includes Bromley, Magic, Mount Snow, Okemo and Stratton. The last three are likely to stay open at least one more weekend. Berkshire East will call it quits on Sunday. Further north, Killington, Sugarbush and Jay Peak will stay open until and into May while Stowe has announced an April 21 closing date.
You can’t think about mild days here in the Hudson valley when in those northern areas you are looking at daytime temps anywhere from 10 t0 20 degrees less and with freezing night time temps. All of these ski areas have slopes that have great exposures that help to preserve the snow on their snowmaking trails. Then again, Killington buries its Superstar trail with as much as 30 feet of snow with the hopes of skiing until June. I have skied at Sugarbush as late as April 29 on a day where it snowed and they wound up getting ten inches!
I had a really good week of skiing with a visit to the Windham Mountain Club, in the northern Catskills, last Friday, followed by a trip to Catamount, near Hillsdale, New York and then Hunter, seven miles south of Windham, on Monday. Last Friday and Saturday were bluebird days with overnight temps below freezing and daytime highs in the upper 40s. Windham still had 25 runs open and with great coverage. All of their steep terrain looked to be in mid-season form with deep bases and they were groomed perfectly. With only a few hundred visitors on Friday, I was doing laps off the Westside Six high-speed detachable chair and sticking to the most shaded trails. Those trails, including Wrap-Around, from the summit, remained firm until you reached the more wide open sections near the base.
Conditions were so perfect, I didn’t want to leave but my legs said otherwise. Windham closed on its scheduled day of March 31, Easter Sunday. Two weeks earlier, Chip Seamans, Windham’s president and GM, told me that he was hoping to make it to closing day after the brutal start to March and in the end he did and with great coverage on a vast majority of their terrain. Clearly, Seamans’ operations team made a lot of snow and were expert “snow farmers.”
Saturday morning, I headed east on Route 23 across the Rip Van Winkle bridge and over to Catamount for some terrific skiing on their dozen open runs from the summit. Catamount had the same slopes open as the previous week and there was virtually no change on coverage despite some rain and warm temps during the previous week.
I stayed mostly on Ridge Run and the combinations of trails that are one the eastern side of the ski area. That side is a novice and intermediate paradise with long and wide open runs once you get off the steeper top. Upper Promenade is the easy way off the secondary summit and provides access to the lower trail network where you can either ski to the Meadows triple chair or ski across the base to the summit quad. Both, Christopher’s and Catapult, two double black diamond trails were open and with deep coverage.
On Monday, I drove over to Hunter, which is only 25 minutes from my home. It was very dark and dreary and temps did not go below freezing at the ski area by the time I arrived for first chair. I took a couple of runs from the summit and found it was getting heavy fast so I stayed on the lower mountain. Using the B quad chairlift I alternated between Mossy Brook and Kennedy Drive, which both still had great coverage. After two hours, I packed it in just as rain drops started to fall. It was another spring skiing experience but at least this time I could say it was April 1, and I wasn’t fooling anyone.
Get out one more time, and happy skiing and riding! You can contact me at asneubert@aol.com or you can visit my Instagram page @asneubert.
