Burke … March 7 2015 … turned out to be a great day!
On the way up I got pulled over going 84mph by a Vermont State Trooper. This guy looked like a character right out of the movie Fargo. I was friendly with him as I could immediately tell he was "one of the good ones". Must have made a good impression because I got a warning and I was on my way.
It’s about a solid 3 hour drive there. Maybe a little less without being pulled over. We were booted up by 10:00am. Oh well, sometimes that’s how it goes.
First run was East Bowl. Let me preface: I haven’t been to Burke since I was in high school. That’s about 16 or 17 years ago. So I vaguely remember a little bit about the mountain, but most of what I knew prior to arrival was based on reading other folks trip reports on this forum.
So East Bowl. Nice run! Packed powder all the way. Great trail. I was tempted to duck into woods but we figured first run let’s actually try and ski a full trail. That was probably the last time that happened. Oh wait, not true; we did a run all the way down Willougby later on. Again, firm and fast packed powder. Very few scratchy spots to be found on the trails, only in the most high trafficked areas would I even bother to put my guard up.
Woods:: First one I did was Dixieland. My father was still getting warmed up so he passed. Darn nice woods! There’s like 3 steeper sections and the rest of it is just a long tree run down the majority of the mountain.
The woods were totally tracked out and bumped up. But in a much better way than Mt Ellen last weekend. This was mostly packed pow and occasionally on the steeper stuff the ruts would be scrapy. But it was a very predictable scenario and very agreeable to my favorite style of skiing which is basically a slowish and steady rhythm right down the fall line.
Burke is an overall challenging mountain but I didn’t manage to find anything overly challenging. That said, I did not ski Power Line and it looked to be semi-tough from what I could see. The most difficult woods I skied were Scooby Doo and that was a single Black. It seems like the black and single black ratings were kind of arbitrary. There were even a couple blue woods that should have been blacks. As for the double blacks… well there really wasn’t a full degree of difference between them and the single blacks.
The mountain has a pretty consistent pitch I guess. But I found the woods consistently enjoyable and basically skied them all day having a great time checking them all out.
Skied till 4:00 so made up for the late start. My back is killing me now !
Birches
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Cave Man
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Dixieland
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No idea what this thing is called.
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That’s me.
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