2023 MDT #6 Reports
Catamount Trail Association's 2023 Four Day Tour MDT #6
from Friday February 24 to Sunday February 27, Sections 27 through 31
Trip Reports:
I nearly cancelled this tour due to lousy skiing conditions leading up to the tour. Craftsbury Outdoor Center recommended going shopping, organizing your wax kit or doing laundry on their Trail Reports. And scouting trips by various group members did not encourage either. A few days prior Brooke reported:
We found plenty of snow above about 1500 ft. We skied up Hazens Notch a little ways and it was fine. Then we went down and looked at where the trail crosses the road near Mines Road and it looked a little sketchy.
So it looks like plenty of cover in the woods above 1500 feet. If it is up to me I will skip the section from the town office to the Hazens Notch parking area, unless we really get a lot more snow. Of course we might!
Low is sketchy - thin with open water of course.
Above 1600' reliable in Hazen's Notch.
Stream crossings open of course!!
But we decided to go ahead, and were all very glad we did! See below for daily reports.
02/24/2023 Day One Report - Six of us skied Sec 28 today.
Section 28 is a pretty good microcosm of the Catamount Trail. Section 28 has everything. Beautiful corduroy groomed trails, long road walks, gladed descents, eroded logging roads, long climbs, brushy sidehill grunts, long gliding descents, nice bridges, open stream crossings, windmills, saw mills, sugar houses, snowmobile trails and trails laid out specifically for skiers, pond crossings, cornfields, hay fields and woods. And that's only in the first ten miles.
We saw moose tracks, turkey tracks and deer tracks.
The new snow (2 more inches last night) was a life saver, and a ski saver. There is enough base, but just barely, down low. It was very cold and a bit windy, but we all made it to Rt 58, with only a little blood. Six hours for about 11 miles.
If you didn't join us today, you probably made the right choice, but we did have a glorious day.
It's gonna be cold tomorrow!
02/25/2023 Day Two Report - It was -16F when we got up this morning. It was a bit above zero by the time seventeen of got going from the Lowell Town Hall a bit after 9am. Some skiers started directly from the town hall while others spotted cars at the end of plowing on the Lowell side of Rt 58 and then chased after the early starters.
The snowmobile trail was lovely down to the river crossings, and we appreciated Jan's bridge. We had one short drop with no base which required a few side-steps to navigate. Down low the base is very limited but we had plenty of depth up higher.
We caught the early starters when there was some navigational confusion caused by a big blow-down on the trail just before we crossed RT 58.
We had to stop and scrape skis a few times because it was hard to know where the recent new 6" was covering the wet spots. The wet spots slowed us down a bit. We saw tracks of fox and grouse and moose and fisher.
When we got to the cars (5.9 miles) some folks decided that was enough and headed home. The snowmobiles had not been out so the rest of us head up to Hazen's Notch on new snow. Some folks continued over the notch and down the other side to get some nice turns in the new snow. The disappointment was that a vehicle had driven up the other side and beat up the snow.
We still can't claim it was a bloodless day since one skiers hit a branch in the face, but it wasn't bad.
I was worried that we wouldn't have enough snow for today's tour, since a scouting trip on Monday showed bare ground near Rt 58 down low. It would have been a real shame to not ski today, it was really great skiing, especially for 2023.
"One reason why skiing the Catamount Trail can be slow." Photo by LeeAnn
"Crossing the field before Rt 58." Photo by Janice
"Crowd at the end of the road walk." Photo by Barbara
"Climbing to Hazen's Notch." Photo by Janice
Tomorrow will be warmer and we'll have lots of fun downhills on Section 31!
02/26/2023 Day Three Report - We met at the Jay Store and took a few minutes to figure out the car shuttle and get to know each other.
"Gathering at the Jay Store for the morning meeting." Photo by Lee
We had seventeen skiers skiing "down" from Jay Pass to Jay Village today. When we drove to the pass one skier realized that her skis were still in a car at the bottom of the mountain, so I skied up a bit and back while she got a ride (thanks Sid!) down and back to get her skis.
Then we had fun blasting along to catch the others. Unfortunately some snowmobiles had gotten up into the woods and ripped the snow up pretty badly in spots. And then I got a call that two skiers had missed a turn off the front of the pack and were long gone downhill. It took some fiddling with phones but we were able to get in touch and they bushwacked back to the trail, and then had to figure out if they were ahead or behind the pack. Turned out they were behind but they caught us.
We found some nice sections for playing in the snow and some nice tele glades below the trail in spots.
The base on the lower half was badly eroded, with about 8" of nice new fluff on top. The stream crossings were tricky with the eroded base and the washed out logging roads were tough too.
Then we came to recent logging, with ruts in the frozen base and chewed up roadway to add to the fun. Pretty much everyone converted to "Go Your Own Way" and skied off the trail to avoid the mess and enjoy the powder. It made herding the cats challenging. The gully near the bottom was very thin cover, but still everyone kept their skis on and made it without too many sparks.
We reconvened at the store, and I asked if, given what we had just skied, people wanted to ski uphill or down tomorrow. Everyone said "Downhill", so I guess they had fun today.
After some chili and soup and coffee, four folks decided they wanted to ski the rest of the way to the Canadian border. So while the cars got retrieved from the pass (thanks, Sid!), four skied north. I drove up to the trailhead at the border where I just happened to meet Ann and her friends who had just skied to the border from the store, ahead of our group. Ann had started skiing the CT several years ago with Marie and me on a four day tour on these same sections. We didn't have enough snow to ski to the border that year, and she had skied everything else since then, but the border kept eluding her. Today she made it!
Then I skied south on thin cover and nice fluff to meet my four skiers. We met after a few miles. I turned around and we skied past the car to the border, singing "O Canada". When we returned to the car we had a short chat with a border patrol officer who wanted to know why were skiing there. He was new and didn't know about the CT, so we told him all about the CT and CTA. And we told him that we didn't see any tracks crossing the border.
Think About This! - Two guys are planning FKT (Fastest Known Times) end-to-end on the Catamount Trail. Here are some articles about one of them:
in the Reformer.
in Seven Days.
on WCAX
Bill's goal is to ski the entire trail in eighteen days, with no help along the way. Imagine skiing what we did today, having slept outdoors for the last two weeks, having climbed Jay Pass, having a 50 lb pack and a deadline.
"View of Hazens Notch in the morning from Jan's porch." Photo by Dagny
02/27/2023 Day Four Report - With the usual shuttle snafus (one skier with car/driving trouble couldn't make it, no good cell service at the trail head), we had nine skiers heading down from a slippery Jay Pass toward Montgomery on Section 30.
There were a few old tracks ahead of us, but mostly it was solid base under about 8" of new-in-the-last-few-days fluff, with a couple brand new and still-coming-down sparkly inches on top. Paul said it was like living in a snow globe, and someone kept shaking it for us!
"Life in a snow globe!" Photo by Dagny
"Eighty-ears-old and going strong!" Photo by Dagny
The woods here are pretty open, so we got to fully embrace the difference between skiing ON the Catamount Trail, and skiing ALONG the Catamount Trail. Hikers are encouraged to keep in the tread, but CT skiers ought to choose the best route for the conditions, as long as you can see blazes and the group.
The stream crossings on Sec 30 are often a challenge, and today was no exception. The recent rain had hardened the base, except in the water courses where it had eroded it right down to the ground. And there are plenty of water courses here, surrounded by boulders and erratics for extra excitement. But if you weren't dealing with a stream crossing it was glorious skiing. Lots of tele turns down through the trees.
We stopped for two Team Meetings on the way down. The first was about Tips and Traps for staying on the trail. One Tip was to look for the blaze beyond the next blaze. And make sure they are blue, with the CTA logo on them. One Trap is that sometimes, either due to a nail popping out or a sloppy blazing job, an arrow can have just one nail and be pointing the wrong way! We found at least one of those today.
The second Team Meeting was about stream crossing techniques. Some of the Tips were to cross at an oblique angle, be in a tele-stance to maintain balance at the transition at the bottom, or to push someone else in and ski over them. Another tip is to look upstream and down for a better crossing spot. If it takes a minute for a each skier to cross a stream and you have ten skiers, that's a ten-minute delay to the group if everyone goes the same way. A Trap was to get halfway up the other side, lose traction and slide back into the stream.
This was day three, four or seven in a row for these skiers, so the climb up over the ridge kind of beat us up. Several folks wished they had been told by their fearless leader to put on skins. Next time!
The second descent was challenging since the base was getting thin. And the sun was starting to warm up the powder, getting very close to clumping before a high haze came in and cooled things down. Now we really made our own individual routes, since the trail goes right down an eroded logging road full of logs and boulders.
I know at least four people face-planted today. If you got your ski under the crust it just stopped. No blood and no tears, as far as I know. Then we had some nice kick-and-glide out the untracked snowmobile trail to the cars. Two skiers kept going south a mile to get the part of Sec 29 that we had skipped Saturday, and the rest of us went home.
This was the first, but I hope not the last, CTA MDT trip to do all four days on the CT this year.
And that ends the 2023 CTA MDT #6. This group was a great mix of new-to-MultiDay Tours skiers and seasoned End-to-Enders.
Thanks to all the landowners and trail maintainers and bridge builders and other behind-the-scenes helpers. Thanks to the CTA office staff for their support of the tour and the trail.
Remember that the CTA can't survive without your volunteer time and/or financial contributions! There's no such thing as a free ski trip.
Thanks to Marie, Barb, LeeAnn, Dagny and Janice for photos.
Thanks especially to Marie, Lee, Paul, Dagny, David and Jan for enabling my addiction to dragging people through snow covered woods. I wouldn't have done it without your counsel, moral support, suggestions and dinners!
"Three kinds of pie for dinner!" Photo by Dagny
Here is the 2023 MDT #6 Four Day Tour by the numbers:
4 days of skiing,
0 days cancelled due to rain and no snow,
4 days with new snow on the ground in the morning,
92 skier-days registered for,
49 actual skier-days skied,
20 skiers skiing at least one day,
4 skiers skiing to Canadian border,
37.4 miles of Catamount Trail skied,
391 skier-miles skied,
17, most skiers on any day,
5, fewest skiers on any day,
10 women skiers,
10 men skiers,
30, age of youngest skier,
80, age of oldest skier!,
~12" of new snow overall,
5 couples skiing together,
4 skiers who skied at least part of all four days,
10 skiers new to MultiDay Tours,
7 skiers who were already End-to-Enders,
0 skiers who skied every part of all four days,
5? trail chiefs who helped keep these sections of trail clear and available,
306+ emails to or from the tour coordinators,
1 hosts who opened his home for skiers,
0 boot failures,
0 ski failure,
4 bailout cars used.
0 days of rain forecast,
0 days of actual skiing in the rain,
0 injuries,
2 lost skiers, we found them again....
0 skiers who went away mad,
0 skiers who missed a day due to communications mix-ups,
2 shuttle mix-ups,
0 skiers left at a trail head,
0 car problems or accidents,
These things were all uncountable, as they should be: smiles, laughs, thank yous, calories burned, help offered, beautiful vistas, tracks in the snow, interesting trail conversations.
A scene from Section 8 in 2017.
Don't forget to look around and enjoy the scenery when you are skiing along the CATAMOUNT trail....
Pray for Snow!
Go to the CTA's 2024 "Multi-Day Tour #7" Main Page