Another successful AlpineZone.com Meet Up was staged for Magic Mountain in Southern Vermont for late March. Bob, Brian, and I met in the lodge and we ran into MrMagic on the slopes. The morning began with beautiful weather and good conditions though it was cloudy most of the day with clouds burning off to allow for decent views towards the afternoon. Magic Mountain had 100% of its terrain open with about somewhere between a quarter to a third left ungroomed.

We begin with a warm up run down Medium to Vertigo with nice packed powder opening up to some big arcs near the bottom. Next we skied Trick to Wand to Showoff; getting in Trick before it scraped up too much. Over on Talisman, a thin groomed track was run down the center with natural and bumps on either side. I liked skier’s right up top and skier’s left down low while Bob and Brian tended to stay on the rough groomed patch. I wanted to show the guys Broomstick which is a great narrow trail off the top of the mountain. However, Bob’s knee was recovering and needed a stress free day of skiing. Despite Broomstick looking flat, I feared Heart of Magician and Lucifer were likely bumped. I volunteered to inspect by way of Master Magician (a guys gotta have his fun ). I took Master skier’s right and I think I overheard a fellow skier mention the words sick and nuts in the same sentence but I wasn’t sure. Skier’s left was fantastic! I only hit three rocks but I scored nearly untouched snow which was by far the best on the mountain. Later I hit Master again skier’s right through the trees which was dust on crust and dust on ice. Not so good. I found out Broomstick was unfortunately not doable without hitting very user unfriendly bumps on Heart or Lucifer.

Before heading in for lunch, I noticed that Red Line began with lots of untouched snow from last week’s storm was starting to get ugly. A lot of base melted since last week and more sticks and rock were showing than I had expected. Pre-lunch was definitely go time for Red Line. I executed a really ugly set of jumps off the rock cliff, one of which had me spun around backwards with my arm around a tree but no harm no foul. I followed that masterpiece up by barely sticking the next five foot drop. It wasn’t my day on Red Line, that was for sure. Below the cliffs the bumps were sweet but conditions were thin. I wasn’t tempted to repeat and was glad to get that out of my system before too much more traffic took all the snow off the trail.

Before going in for some food and suds we found MrMagic at the top of the double. We made some more sweet carves re-covering all the trails we hit in the morning and adding a few cruisers that we missed. Conditions stayed great on most trails with exception of Trick and Talisman which saw some deterioration. While skiing Wizard, I took the Slide of Hans option which produced okay bumps but nothing to write home about.

Brian made the observation near the end of the day that you could still see groomer tracks on the edges of some trails. Yup! Magic is one incredibly uncrowded mountain for sure! I finished off on Goniff Glade but probably should have hit Twilight Zone instead. Decent bumps with a touch of roughness but overall a phenomenal showing on Goniff for this late in the season.