Wow! This season is off to a “Retro” start! On November 7th I saw a picture taken at 7:30am of the upper Midway parking lot full of cars! That’s a lot of skiers and riders “earning their turns!” And I’m sure that’s been a regular occurrence leading up to the official opening of lift-served skiing.
I say “Retro” since I’m betting it’s been a long time since that many people got that much of a head start on the season! From the late 1920s until 1940 it was the only way to enjoy Mt Mansfield. Yes, lift-served skiing here started in 1937, but that was just the Toll House slope. So if you wanted to ski the whole mountain, skinning was the only choice. Legends such as Nosedive Annie (Ann Bonfoey Taylor) were made based on the number of runs they were able to make in a day on the Nosedive. In 1940 the single chair was added and then trails like Nosedive, Lord, and Toll Road became far easier to access.
Several friends have asked if I had already skinned up for some early turns. No, was the answer, and I began to feel like a wuss for not having made the trek. I have the equipment and I hike in the summer so why wasn’t I motivated to go? I have spent a lot of wasted rationalization trying to come up with a good reason.
The best I came up with is that I have been conditioned to associate the first day of the ski season with the start of lift-served skiing. I have always looked forward to the beginning of a new ski season. There’s something exhilarating about those first couple of runs. Do I remember how to do this? Of course you do, but the thought still exists in the back of your mind. Then the blood rushes to the tips of your skis and you begin the dance with gravity that is skiing.
One of the adjustments I have to make on those first runs is remembering to breathe! I find myself holding my breath so that when you stop you end up gasping for a breath. That only happens a couple of times before I relax and breathe more normally.
But back to my rationalization, I didn’t get hooked on skiing until I was in college and that was via lift-served skiing. And typically the first day of the season involved a ski area that had snowmaking. Killington made its reputation by being the first area in the east to open and we would make a pilgrimage to Killington for our first day of the season. Often that was just a few runs on Snowshed with seemingly thousands of other skiers, but it meant a new ski season had begun.
Unlike those memories, the first day at Stowe this year saw basically the whole mountain open! I’ve got to say the trails were in much better condition than I am! Ironically, the only closed trails were two snowmaking trails where they were letting the “whales” dry out. It would have made an interesting trivia question of when the last time Upper Goat was open on opening day!
Since so many folks get their Stowe Reporters via mail and mail delivery has been slow, I’m going to plug an event that will be held on Friday December 5th! The Vermont Ski and Snowboard Museum will be holding an opening party for two new exhibits at the Museum from 5:00-8:00pm. One of the exhibits is entitled “Snurfing to Snowboarding” made up of artifacts from Paul Graves’ collection. Paul is a snowboarding pioneer who was a Snurfing champion and organized the first Snowboarding National Championships back in 1982. I’m a skier, but I found this collection very interesting! The other exhibit is a collection of Hubert Schriebl’s photography. Hubert spent most of his career at Stratton where he captured the growth of both skiing and snowboarding in Vermont. Hope to see you there! Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers! Thank you for supporting my column.
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