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The Cost of Skiing the Ice Coast

Christian Renzi



I'm in the woods at at Sugarbush in Warren, Vermont. The snow is waist deep and my skis are going through untracked powder. The weather is warm, mid 30s, and a light snow is coming down from the sky. It's after lunch and I'm feeling a little sluggish from the Sip of Sunshine IPA I drank before heading back out onto the slopes. I ski barefoot, something people tend to make fun of me for, and it's causing my feet to sweat big time. They're going to smell unpleasant as they sit by the fire, drying tonight. The woods feel like absolute perfection today. I'm learning to pick my lines before heading down through the trees. If I know where I'm going I'm less likely to eat shit on my way down.


With my line picked I turn my skis to face vertically down the hill and I go for it. Skiing is as much a mental sport as it is physical. The woods are intimidating and tight in many spots. If I psych myself out at any point and attempt to stop in a narrow corridor I could find myself wrapped around a tree.


The line I picked is almost perfect. It's been done before causing it to almost be like a luge through the woods. I'm feeling confident and just as I'm about to make a nice carve around a tree I hit a hidden patch of ice and I'm down. Ouch. The cost of skiing the Ice Coast strikes again.


In the east we grow up skiing on ice. I've just returned from a week in Vermont. It started out with a lot of snow in the woods. February in Vermont can be amazing...or it can really suck. By Wednesday it was over 70 degrees. I was standing outside of the cabin wearing a t shirt and pants and I was actually hot in the sun. New England weather makes very little sense and it's a pain in the ass if you're a skier. We take what we can get here and skiers on this coast never take powder days for granted.


I grew up skiing in New Hampshire. I learned to ski on Attitash Mountain. It's definitely a family hill and the triple chair to the top is an absolute nightmare. It moves at a painfully slow pace and takes over 20 minutes to get you to Attitash's not so impressive summit. Eventually we migrated to Wildcat Mountain, which upped the challenge level and also had a really nice high speed quad to the top of the mountain. By lunch we could get in nine or ten runs.


A few years ago I made my first ski trip to the great state of Vermont AND IT WAS MAGICAL. Vermont is different from New Hampshire. They tend to get more snow and they have some of the best beer in the country to drink in between runs.


What made me a true believer of the magic of Vermont was a trip to Jay Peak in the last weekend of March in 2015. Jay is only a few miles from the Canadian border, pretty much in the middle of nowhere and they get A LOT OF SNOW. The woods of Jay are all fair game when it comes to skiing and it pretty much becomes a day of "pick your own adventure." The winter of 2015 was a great time to be a skier. The east was slammed with storm after storm and Jay had areas in the woods that were chest deep with snow. I spent my entire first trip to Jay in the woods and by the end of the day my legs were absolutely cooked. It was amazing.


The Ice Coast can be deceiving though. Last year in February of 2017 I found myself at Sugarbush with a ton of snow to ski on. The woods looked perfect. One thing you learn when skiing here is that you should never trust your eye when it comes to the snow. I've stumbled onto trails that look like fresh ungroomed powder, only to realize that the beautiful piles of snow are actually ice piles of death. On this particular day ice wasn't the problem. The snow had softened up as the day became warmer, causing it to stick the bottom of my ski like glue. After picking my line in the woods and turning my skis vertical I found my skis unable to move and went crashing face first into the mashed potato snow. The cost of skiing the Ice Coast strikes again.


Warm temperatures and rain have set the 2018 season back a little bit. I'm really hoping for a snowy March so I can take another trip up to the great state of Vermont. Keep your fingers crossed!

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