Sunday, February 7, 2010

2-7-10: Day Trip to Butternut

Yesterday my buddy Scott and I took a day trip up to Ski Butternut in scenic Great Barrington, MA. Butternut is a smaller mountain, but they have a nice deal for Connecticut Ski Council members ($35 for an all-day lift ticket), and it's bigger than the Connecticut mountains. The trip is about 90 minutes from southern CT, which is about half-way to Vermont mountains. I'd heard decent things about it, and didn't want to stay off the slopes for too long.

We got there a little before 9:00AM, and were on the slopes by 9:15. We started with a nice little trip from the top on Pied Piper across to Cruiser to check out the easier of the two terrain parks (which is also free to use). Nice little warm-up. The rest of the day was spent on the various blue and black trails. Butternut only has a few black diamond runs, and none of them are particularly steep or difficult. I actually had my best run on Lucifer's Leap, a short black diamond run at the top. Scott tried Downspout, which was the toughest of the runs because it has some decent bumps at the top. I decided to take some runs down Freewheeler, which was the toughest of the blue runs all the way to the skier's left of the mountain. Nice rollers on that trail.

One of the things Scott suggested was for me to keep my feet a little closer together while turning. This is something I've heard different things about, but, to be honest, it definitely helped. I felt better turning to the right, and have started to do a little better at actually making S turns as opposed to "Z turns" that look more like hockey stops. My only spill of the day was in the afternoon when I was going way too fast on a flat and caught an edge. Nothing major.

Over the course of about six hours of skiing, we had hit almost every trail at least once or twice. The lines got to get longer in the afternoon, so we ended up leaving at around 3:00PM. Nice little day on the slopes. I'm feeling more confident each time I hit the harder terrain. Now I just need to work more on my edges during turns and I think I'll be good to go for the really steep stuff.


Go Saints!

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