Several people have asked me lately, “Is there enough snow to ski?”
You have no idea.
My friends and I ski one or two days every week at Belleayre Mountain in the Catskills. It’s owned by New York State, managed by the Olympic Regional Development Authority and the rates are cheap for us senior citizens.
Over the last few years they’ve updated their entire snow making system. When temperatures fall below freezing, water is blown with high pressure air in a fine mist out of “guns” that line the trails.
In the course of 12 to 16 hours tons and tons of snow is piled on the slopes. Then the snow cats come out and push the snow around, grading it smooth into what is called corduroy.
The old snowmaking equipment would make piles of snow 2 to 3 feet high and maybe 20 feet in length. The new guns do five times that.
Many of you might remember when we had very little snow back in the 80s. Many small, local ski areas closed because they had no snow or any way to make it.
Well, that’s not a problem at Belleayre. And with the gondola and new chair lifts, thousands of people flock to the slopes every day on the weekends and holidays. That’s why we ski during the week — we almost have the mountain to ourselves.
Sometimes, however, the massive amounts of newly blown snow creates a problem.
Last Thursday they turned the guns on at 3:00 in the afternoon. On Friday we went down to ski. By 9 a.m. the lifts were running, and we headed to the top of the mountain.
We usually do our first run on an easy trail called Roaring Brook. It’s not steep and gives us a chance to get the kinks out of our legs.
There were a lot of people heading towards the Brook, so my buddy Wayne turned onto Onondaga instead. There was one gun blowing snow, but that didn’t slow us down.
Now, we are good skiers. Wayne and I have skied together on and off for about 60 years. That intermediate run should not have been a problem, but it was an absolute nightmare.
We were committed, though. There was no turning back.
Huge piles of snow covered the slope and visibility was less than 10 feet. It was hopeless trying to get an edge with our skis for control and even snowplowing was impossible. It looked like a war zone. The trail was littered with downed skiers, leaving us no place to go.
Wayne yelled back, “I’m down!” and I soon crashed as well. No one was hurt. In fact it was rather funny. Wayne tried to get up by pushing his ski pole into the snow, but it sunk in most of the way to the grip.
I went head first into a pile of loose snow as well. I finally got out of my skis to get up, but they sunk into the snow better than a foot when I tried to get back into my bindings.
We both finally got up and slowly worked our way down to a level spot with a hairpin turn. Then came more whales of snow with more guns blasting. Other skiers emerged from the blizzard and mine field and we found a groomed trail to get down to the lift.
There was no way to ski that run. We took the Overlook Quad lift back to the top and skied Roaring Brook. By then Onondaga was closed by the ski patrol. We laughed about that adventure for the rest of the day.
On Monday we skied again and the Onondaga run was fantastic. We skied almost every trail on the mountain. The sun was out and the whole mountain was groomed to perfection, allowing us to make 21 runs.
With the amount of snow on the mountain I think we’ll be skiing far into April. Belleayre has the best snowmaking in the east and it’s almost in our backyard.
Boy are we ever lucky!