Monday, February 13, 2006
Big Day at Big Jay
On Friday evening, Jason and I headed up to VT, crashing at his Sugarbush condo. Since the trees at the Bush are suffering from January r@!#s, we hit the road early Saturday am and drove about 1.5 hours up the the "center of the Northeast Powder Universe" otherwise known as Jay Peak.
The weather: superb. The day was brisk, temps in the teens, but with blue bird skies... a perfect ski day. Thus we decided that it was time to hit the trees and ravines on the famous Big Jay. After asking some discreet questions of lot attendant and bumping into a splitboarder (gee, I wonder where he was going? ;) ) we were confident Big Jay was "on" (meaning the snow was deep enough to ski and ride). This would be our first excursion out there, thus we were downright giggly about this.
So, we took the lift up after a single warm up run and immediately ducked into the traverse over to Big Jay. The hike over was beautiful... well packed and easy to hike. The first half is rolling and rideable/skiable and the second half is a skin or a boot pack up to the summit. The shot here is from my phone, thus the res is low but the winter-wonderland look and feel is obvious.
After scoping out some entrances we chose one near the top of the summit. The entrance was tight and admittingly being unfamiliar with the terrain, I was cautious, and I made rather bad turns at the top. But within a couple minutes, it opened up to wider glades and ravines. Although it had been tracked out by probably a hundred other skiers, there was tons of powder to be had, with some lines actually being fresh tracks.
We explored several parallel ravines on decent, keeping within earshot or eyeshot the hole time. We ducked and weaved down gullies around trees, over lips and down dips. This is J emerging from one of the gullies, gittin some:
The conditions were great and the last dump was at least 4 days prior. The place really holds onto its snow.
Unfortunately, even though we knew better, we missed the easy way out. We got lulled into some fresh tracks down low on the face and we went too far, riding to the botton of the basin, and thus missing the easy traverse out. No worries... we were not the first to do make this mistake and there were some others that had tracked out in the flats like us. Jason had no problems on the skis and my collapsible poles came in darn handy on the snowboard... I only had to take a foot out twice.
After about 10-15 minutes on a traverse we bushwhacked a bit then rode a partially frozen, very funky, streambed. We were out to the access road in another 10-15 mins and got to hitch-hiking back to the base. We had a short wait: only about 10 minutes before a Jeep Cherokee stopped, and we hopped in. Not bad! We were back in the lodge in 5 mins for a late lunch... high fiving and grins all around. Damn its nice to make a first decent in knee deep powder!
