Great snow on the slopes today.

Perfect, fluffy, tasty, forgiving corduroy, benefiting from a bunch of new snow will make the skiing at the B-East today, tonight, tomorrow, tomorrow night and Sunday, some of the best of the SEASON!

Folks, it really is that good here.

The question that you have to answer for yourself is this, do you want to fight through the crowds of a busy northern resort (that didn't get any of the snow that we did from this last storm) or do you want to hit the B-East with the fam (the one your bring or the one that'll meet you here) and enjoy a great weekend of skiing.

I know where I'll be, just try and catch me. 

Speaking of which, this morning, I went on a rondanee back-country adventure to a point nearby (double top secret location, deep in the Western Massachusetts back country) that involved some of the most exposed terrain that you can get in New England -- no joke.

Morgan, a lifelong local and myself, planned this trip yesterday afternoon, right about the time the B-East started showing signs of having yesterdays lovely snow, skied out. So we met this morning at 8, drove to the start of our adventure and toured to the top of this pitch in about an hour and half.

Morgan and I followed what we at first thought was an old logging road, but there weren't any of the tell tale trees scrapes that would show that a skidder with logs had been through, so maybe it just was a really old road that had long ago been taken over by wind falls and streams.

The route we choose was a round-a-bout way through an Oak and Black Birch forest that transitioned to some beautiful Sugar Maples and peaked out in the Hemlocks.

Everywhere we looked, there was incredible animal sign, with 100's of square feet of scraped earth (they worked through 2-3 feet of snow) where the deer have been digging down to get to the acorns.

Alongside the deer tracks, which followed the old road we were traveling, Morgan and I followed a set of very fresh tracks that in hindsight (searching from the computer when we got back) were exactly like the ones shown below (photo is from California, but now that I know better, I am half tempted to back up to take a picture of the ones we skied by for an hour, so you can see I'm not full of it).

Just so we're clear, those are Mountain Lion tracks...

Obviously, I didn't get eaten, and neither, thankfully did Morgan. The snow was deep, the sky clear, and we had quite a sweat worked up, but when we hit the summit we were rewarded with an awesome three state view and am impressive, steep and long drop below. 

After a mountain top libation and a snack, we snapped into our powder boards and really tasted the goods. Ripping knee deep fresh pow down 1100' vertical feet of steepness was mind blowing. The fact that that is in Western Mass ~ priceless. Even though there was a significant crust layer, the snow on top of it was deep and forgiving.

Not wanting to forget a thing, we took turns skiing and watching, and we hooted and hollered down this awesome face (which begs the question, if there are two idiots skiing down a mountain in the middle of nowhere and they are making a lot of noise, but there is nobody around to hear them, are they making any noise?).  Bad jokes aside, with some water right below our feet, steep mountains all around, and a couple of feet of snow underfoot, the ambiance made us feel like we were in a mountain range far, far away.

With good energy flowing, a cup of coffee waiting and a beautiful drive home, I got back to my office and spent a little time three dimensionally flying the route on Google Earth. Still amped up, I got down to the nitty gritty using high school trig learn that we were skiing an average a 37 degree pitch, with definite steeper sections. In total we skinned close to 2 miles, breaking trail the whole way, and did the full trip in about 1:45.

Pretty sweet for WMASS!

Oh and guess what, I just got up and looked away from my computer and its snowing...