After earning turns across the Notch on the John Sherburne Ski Trail via skinning up the Tuckerman Ravine Trial, I ventured across Route 16 to Wildcat Ski Area to capitalize on the $20.00 Sunday Afternoon Cruise ticket. Despite knowing the snow would be disappointing compared to the excellent natural snow conditions of the Sherburne, I believed it would be worth the money for several additional two thousand vertical foot runs from the summit. Boy, was I wrong!
The sound of the day that afternoon at Wildcat was “Scraaaaaaaaape!” Despite the 2-3″ of fresh snow that fell the evening before (the Snow Report on Wildcat’s web page claimed an unbelievably over hyped lie of 4-7″), nearly all of Wildcat’s trails were unmercifully scraped down by my first descent around 1 P.M. Even the sides of the trails had little to nothing to offer where normally loose snow and powder piles are to be found. If my legs had not been so tired from skinning for two hours earlier that morning, I may have found it more bearable. But scraped hard pack was hardly what I was looking to end my day on.
My first descent down the mountain was via Lynx Lair, Upper Lynx, Middle Lynx, and Catenary. The entirety of Lynx has hard pack and generally scraped. Loose soft snow was hard to find even on the sides of the trail. Catenary proved to be the reliably best snow on the mountain with mostly natural snow ending on an ugly scraped down bump pitch. 1600′ Vertical of crap for 400′ Vertical of decent snow. Not a very pleasing trade off since the 400′ decent snow was hardly epic.
Next up was the Wildcat Trail top to bottom. Upper Wildcat was hard pack with scrapes every where. Some loose snow pushed to skier’s right but you really had to work for it and it wasn’t much. The bump section before the Middle Wildcat intersection was decent with okay bumps and variable scrapes. I dumped 3/4 the way down after loosing my balance uncharacteristically. Clearly the skinning earlier in the day and the prior day’s skiing at Cannon was taking its toll on my concentration and muscle awareness. Middle and Lower Wildcat generally sucked with okay loose snow pushed to skier’s right on Lower Cat.
Final run was Upper Catapult featuring hard pack and scraped to Lower Top Cat under the Quad which was scraped bumps and thin cover dumping out onto Middle Lynx which was about the same as the first run. I ducked rope into Mountain Jag Glade which looked sweet but was unsatisfied with the minimal powder as I found myself more concerned with dodging hidden rocks and other such treats than enjoying the turns. I ducked out and traversed over to Lower Panther which had okay soft bumps and snow but dumped out onto Chute which was scraped to a bone with ugly random bumps.
Perhaps things were better earlier in the day but by the time I had arrived everything at The Cat had been chewed up good. There was still decent tracks to be made on Catenary and Panther but the tracks simply were not worth the hassle of hacking down 1600′ Vertical of scraped hard pack. Three runs for $20.00 is a pretty sad per run average of just under $7.00 per run. It was a fair gamble though as I would have been kicking myself had I turned down a $20.00 half day ticket and heard reports of awesome conditions. My normal per run average is around $2.00 per run; however, my normal lift ticket price is just under $50.00. Despite the conditions, at least I only paid $20.00 to sample the goods whereas the full day price was $55.00.