I spend the week between Christmas and New Years at home every year. The race club runs a "camp" for all the athletes and a bunch of returning alumni (college kids). We generally ski 5 of the 7 days. This year was no exception except for the lack of open terrain. The skiing was weird to terrific but never bad that week. The mountain stared with 2 trails and eventually opened a third. There was just enough cold between the warm and rain to not only patch up what show was washing away but add to the overall. The nice thing about all of this is that everyone feels bad for everyone. In a more "normal" winter, there are pretty good crowds during the holiday week. The management is often stingy with giving the race club hill space to train on. The kids complain about the the lift lines, the "liftys" doing their jobs by checking for passes, the lack of training courses even if we are better served by free skiing to improve technique and whatever else comes along. This year there seems to be none of that. The mountain management has done everything they can to help us out. While lift attendants are always friendly to the coaches, they sometimes get frustrated with high energy pre-teens and start over reacting to any hint of an infraction to the orderly process of loading people on chair lifts. Again, there has been no complaints from the any camp and they all seem to be weathering (sorry) all this with a "this is what it is; lets just make the best of it" positive attitude.
Our first races were canceled to to snow depth so we got an extra week of training before the younger folks (12 and under) were racing. I sometimes wish we put off the race starts until late in the winter. When we start off skiing outside of training courses, we seem to make great progress. As we get into racing each weekend, and training in gates, things seem to stop in terms of fundamental progress towards really good skiing. It is frustrating to have such little time with the athletes (2 evening and weekends) but no one, including me, has more time to give. Because of my travel, I miss some evening sessions. Luckily, I have a great assistant. She is a bit under experienced but an alumni of our race program and happens to be in Syracuse doing a masters after 5 years of college and life in Colorado. Lots of energy, and the kids think she is the best. While she hasn't really said it, I think she enjoys my absences to a degree so she can teach and coach in her own style rather than with mine. I am a bit sorry she will achiever her degree and head back out west when she does. While I am a very avid small mountain skier, I always council younger folks to move to real mountains if they want skiing to be a big part of their life. While I love what I do and have always found great fun on small mountains, there is nothing quite like being able to ski 1500 plus feet of vertical without stopping for a lift ride.. Off to Ski Round Top for a Monday - Tuesday (1/9, 1/10) PSIA workshop clinic. Ski Round top is in souther Pennsylvania, south of Harrisburg. I skied all say Sunday and headed out after that. The drive for me is about 250 miles so, it took me a while. It is pretty easy as almost all of it is interstate. To get to the mountain itself, I would recommend just following your GPS. It was a bunch of back roads with pretty sparse signs along the way. I could not begin to describe how to get there from Harrisburg.
Despite being so far south, the ski area has done a remarkable job with the weather they have has to work with this season. There seems to be two approaches and maybe a forced approach; get some of the mountain open with good snow depth or get lots of the mountain open with not so much snow depth. The forced approach is both narrow in terms of the mountain and thin in terms of the cover. Ski Round Top was a bit of good snow on some of the mountain but were somewhat forced into the not so deep category as a result of the weather. There was a pretty good variety of terrain, including some short steeps, but overall, lots of the mountain was not open. That said, I had a great time. The group were pretty accomplished skiers that were all still teaching. PSIA Workshop updates are mainly organized towards what the group wants (as opposed to a more structured curriculum offered in other types of courses). We worked mainly on personal skiing improvement, so we went up and down a lot. It was a bit cold Monday night and the area sprayed an inch of man-made over all the open terrain. I have only seen this snow making style there and Bear Creak Mountain Resort (last season). It made for some good skiing Tuesday. All in all, Ski Round Top is a well organized and nicely set up ski area. There is a nice variety of terrain and a friendly family oriented approach to the business. Nice skiing, nice lodge, pretty good food and fun people. I hope to get back there when more of the terrain is available for skiing.
