Sunday, January 25, 2009

Cannon 1/24 - 1/25

Chalk up another great weekend at Cannon.

Exploration was the theme. Not a whole lot of new snow and temps were cold and the wind was blowing. On trail conditions were fast but it was a tad hard getting an edge to bite so we eventually decided to try our luck a bit more off piste.

Saturday we decided to venture down Tuckerbrook for the first time this season and duck out on one of the glades before making it all the way out to Franconia. We opted for Stinger (not Slider like I said in my Twitter post) and it was...lets say interesting. Lots of snow, but not quite enough to fill in that particular terrain.

Affectionately known as the 'Junkyard'

It looked great, basically untouched, but there were lots of little air pockets and tree wells where there wasnt enough base down to fill things in and there were lots of places you could get a tip snared and come to a complete stop. Luckily everyone avoided any major issues. I got snagged once but I was going slow enough at the time that things were ok.

Things filled in a bit nicer a little further down and we were able to get some nice sections in where you could link more turns without worrying about falling into a pile of hidden christmas trees. Bill got some nice sequence shots of me towards the bottom. By this point I was operating on 1.5 poles. Due to an errant pole plant higher up my pole sank to about half shaft, got caught on something and snapped off as I kept skiing. Good thing they were only $25.




1.5 is all I need

A bit after this sequence I ran into some issues with what I thought was a big powder puff. Turns out it was a large mound of mostly solid earth. Weird things happen when you hit something solid expecting it to be soft fluffy powder that you blow right through. I am having trouble finding the words to describe the sensations so I'll just go with this:


Believe it or not I skied out of this

No pics from Sunday, but more exploring was had. We spent a bit of time trying to find the entrance to some lines lookers right of the Tramline. We are sure there is some sweet stuff in there, we have pictures to prove it and we have been studying them in depth trying to find possible entrances. Its only a matter of time...stay tuned for a post in another week or two that will more than likely have a report on said lines.

We were very fortunate to get some sweet recon info from Bill about a stash that none of us had ridden to date. He gave great directions and we were able to find it without issue. You may notice that I am leaving out details about location and you can be sure that I am doing that on purpose. It is apparent that very few people know about this locale and we are definitely going to keep it A list for as long as possible. Suffice it to say, it was awesome and there was snow to be had even with the last dump being a week ago.

Cannon just doesn't seem to get old.

Mod Squad '09

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