We pulled into the Peabody Slopes upper parking lot at 8:18AM to see it was almost full! I thought the Super Bowl Sunday Two-fer crowds were gonna be ugly, but it turned out that everyone showed up early so they could leave early. Crowds were definitely not a problem and had this been a normal snow year with better than 90% of terrain open, what little crowds there were, would have been slightly better distributed.
Sunday was a Blue Bird day with no clouds in the sky and awesome views of the Franconia Ridge with a little haze on the horizon preventing far views towards VT. The temperature at the summit at 9AM was 40F! The afternoon only got warmer, what a beautiful day.
Sunday was the best groomer action I have experienced at Cannon this season in the AM. We took laps on Middle Cannon, Gary's, and Rocket and they all had really great snow. Bumps on skier's right of Gary's and Rocket are still kinda blah but much better than my last report. Over on Avalanche, there had been a water leak near the Banshee Cut Off that left much of skier's far right on avalanche frozen ice. Bumps skier's right were more like random mounds that were best skied by turning on the backside, which was kinda fun. Nice line on Zoomer right under the chair with delightful soft snow.
The Tram wasn't too packed leading to an interesting summit. Upper Cannon had delightful snow early in the AM with Tramway and Upper Ravine not so delightful and not softening up at all. Profile looked rather scraped from the get go and I decided that the upper mountain just wasn't where it was at today.
The Links got shredded per usual, but they were worth the effort to get to Lower Hardscrabble which had some of the finest snow on the mountain all day. Lower Hard is not normally a trail I give many props to. Bypass was roped even though it looked skiable but not much fun at that whereas skier's right on Paulie's Extension gets my nod for Run of the Day status with awesome soft bumps.
Fantastic afternoon on the slopes, but felt kinda trapped on the groomers all day which were eventually scraped pretty badly just past noon time. Best I've seen Cannon all year regarding the groomed terrain, so I can not complain. Crowds were a non-issue with longest line (Tram wait aside) being about 4 minutes for the Cannonball Quad. The barely noticeable trickle of snow leading up the Saddle towards was a sad sight indeed and not inviting in the slightest on the first weekend of February.