SallyCat

If you want to come to NH/VT by car or plane, go for it. Your Peak Pass is good at Crotched, Mt. Snow, Attitash, and Wildcat. That would make for a good North--south driving safari. Mt. Snow probably has the best snow of all four right now. It's been a grim winter up here so far unless you like boilerplate and holiday crowds. Vermont has WAY better beer than NH, but any ski area is going to be reasonably near a brewpub. If you need nightlife beyond that you haven't skied hard enough. BUT: if you fly in and rent a car, it won't have winter tires and trust me, you want winter fucking tires up here. Don't believe anyone who tells you that AWD with "all season" tires is fine. I spend a lot of my free time treating those people after they slide across oncoming lanes and/or into ditches and trees. But I kind of agree with the fly-out-west argument, maybe with a couple of short connecting flights to break things up and some medical help to relax. You may not want chemical assistance, but also nobody wants to be on a plane with someone who's hysterical, so just have a big ol' pot gummy before you get on the plane and wean yourself off the drugs as you get more used to flying. Flying is an irrational act; there's no moral victory in "toughing it out" sober when there is help available to overcome your perfectly reasonable fear.

Me, too! I would see anything with Will Ferrell and JLD. It's just funny to imagine a comic American remake of Force Majeure. The original was brilliant because it was SOOOOOO quietly, painfully awkward. Will be fun to compare the two.

Also, good god, are those will Ferrell's real bottom teeth?

^ That's a remake/ripoff of Force Majeure.

Opening day at Cannon yesterday. I recognized the conditions right away: "Mid-January Poconos After a Freeze-Thaw Cycle". By 9:30 am the upper trails were scraped-off boilerplate in and out of deep shadow, and the trails that actually had snow were horribly rutted and covered in chicken-head scree. And it was super crowded. Gosh, I was almost homesick! 🙄

Yep. Tuition is $80,000 a year, but if you enroll in January you'll get a bargain 50% off!

A big, ugly, cinderblock pig.

I can't believe I didn't know this, but Bretton Woods has night skiing on weekends until 8pm. I'm super psyched, because that means I can ski on Friday afternoons/evenings. Also, we have three "elective weeks" at my school throughout the year, where you can teach an eclectic class or do something outdoors (mountain biking, rock climbing, etc.). So right away I submitted a proposal for the February electives week: "Ski every day, all day. End of proposal." It was approved!

Nice! It's gorgeous here right now. The humidity broke about a week ago and it's been clear days and crisp nights ever since. There were some yellow leaves on my front step this morning. Next time I go to Brownsville for the weekend I'm going to bring my skis back with me. Cool thing about living on campus is that if there's a snow dump, I can get up early and get in a skin-and-ski on the small mountain right across the street.

Yeah, I was going to try to go without a pass this year, but f-that. Things may be tight but I didn't take a job in the Whites to NOT ski. Blue's pass was the best bang for the skiing buck I've ever seen. Not much night skiing up here, so the potential for hours-on-snow is so much less.

Yeah, that's it for winter spending. I'll be having cheap beer and peanut butter sandwiches to the parking lot.

Ok, I did it! White Mountain Superpass. Cannon, Bretton Woods, and Waterville Valley. Oof, it was more expensive than the Epic Pass.

Well GSS, I only met a handful of PASRs before I suddenly moved north (though my funnest-ever moments at Blue were hearing "SallyCaaaaaaaaat!" from the chair while I "skied" below! Thank you all for that!) I still check in here because I love the convo and because so many people here come up to VT/NH and know the areas here. And since I know nothing, any advice is most welcome. Since I'll likely be up in NH most of this winter, that means my 1 Br Brownsville condo is largely available during the ski season. It's got backcountry skiing literally out the back door, 30 minutes to Okemo and 45 to Killington. Killer general store with farm-to-table food and an amazing craft beer selection, as well as a riotous Thursday night race league that will challenge the drinking prowess of even the most prolific PASR. Not to mention that weed is legal in VT and my cupboard seems to always be full in that regard. I try to give back, is what I'm saying. 😁

After some hemming and hawing about where to get a pass this year, I think I finally decided: Cannon. It's 45 minutes from campus and is the closest White Mountain skiing to East Haverhill, NH, where I work at a boarding school and live in an on-campus apartment. I've been driving the hour back to W. Windsor on weekends lately, which is easy-peasy in good weather and allows me to see friends and stay connected to a community that I really like. I was going to try to find something that would allow me to split my time between VT, and NH, but I hate winter driving and I'm f-ing tired at the end of a teaching week. Plus the cat hates being dragged back and forth between houses. Also, I'll save money not having to heat the W. Windsor place. So my decision now is down to weather I want to get just the Cannon pass or go a couple hundred bucks more for the White Mountain Superpass, which includes Bretton Woods and Waterville Valley. Bretton appeals to me because they evidently have a significant number of intermediate gladed areas. What say you PASRs?

I have friends here who work at Okemo and it sounded like absolute chaos at the beginning of this year (their first season under Vail). Their hiring process either broke down or was nonexistent; people (including patrollers) didn't know if they had jobs until literally a day before the mountain opened. The lines at guest services were long and slow because the staff was still figuring out how to do things. Benefits like family/friend passes were cut and the number of hours you have to work to qualify for an Epic pass was increased. I'm toying with getting an Epic, but since I'm teaching I'll just have school holidays free and that's when places like Okemo are insanely, unbearably crowded. I think I'm going to get a VT teacher pass at Magic ($300), which gets me on the Freedom pass, so three tix each at some smaller areas up here. I'll get to ski at Cannon once in a while on the school's dime, and depending on how much skiing I do up here in NH during school sessions, I might get a pass at Tenney, which is under $300.