Christmas Week

It has been a different kind of Christmas week up here--the kind with no snow. While Bob & Steve dealt with elder care in Manch, the good wives came up and skied on Tuesday. It was lousy. Barely a flake on the mountain. We went to happy hour at the Lookout with young men to our left who ignored us and older men to our right who didn't. We were "Leo-ed" as Leo, starter at Green Mountain and Chatty Patty spent hours telling us all about themselves. Leo did ask Diana twice about herself, "so do you rent at Glazebrook for the whole season?" Twice. Or maybe three times. Not great listeners.

Wednesday was a much better day on the mountain. Bob had come up the night before and Steve came up in the morning. It had begun to snow and got better and better all day. Run of the day was at the end when ski patrol dropped the rope on the West Glade and we got 8 inches of freshies. We then went down and did another 8 at the bottom of Highline in our secret stash.

Thursday was 6 degrees and windy when I got there, and rose to 14 by the time I left. We were a sad little trio. Steve didn't ski Thursday. He may have broken a toe walking around the condo. He went back to Manch to be a good son. By 11 o'clock I needed a warm-up, but trying to get a seat at the K-1 lodge was ridiculous. With no summit lodge and Bear closed, the place was a madhouse. P.B. told me they are down 500 seats on the mountain. We had hot chocolate with people just like us only older. They even called the Snowdon Quad the double-double. They bitched about this and that, and remembered the good old days with Pres Smith skiing in 1959. I thought I was looking at us in a time warp.

Lift lines were 15 minutes long. The K-1 was down, and they weren't running the Snowdon Cripple. We took Superstar up for one run. At the top everyone is filtered down the icy Suicide Alley to avoid the Superstar Headwall and get to Skyelark. If one person went down, the whole stream was going down. The mountain really needed to put a snowgun on that. The skiing there was good because everyone was stuck in the alley.

Today is supposed to be much warmer. The rest of the week is not looking good for accumulation anywhere in the East.