It’s been snowing really hard in Syracuse. There’s at least two feet on the ground and it’s entertaining to get around campus. All the shortcuts across the grass are gone, unless you want to walk through pretty deep snow.
Everyone here seems to complain about the snow. I love it. Sure, it may be a pain to walk through it, it’s sort of slippery, cold, often happens when it’s windy and wet. But snow is awesome! Snow means skiing. It also creates a cooler, more crisp air than rain and silences everything. Weird how it does that.
Killington
Speaking of skiing, Killington was fun over the weekend. I was fun to finally see a big-time East Coast resort. I have to say, there’s nothing really bad I can say about it, except that the snow conditions (“good” though they were) can’t even compare to the West. The snow was hard underneath some soft stuff, but it was nothing like the soft pack of Meadows.
Nice Skis
Instead of getting my skis shipped from Oregon, I demoed skis. I was on the Elan Magfires. I skied on them over the summer at hood and they were great. The are almost a race ski but have great all-mountain attributes. They’re race stiff through the middle but have softer tips and tails. This lets the ski get up on top of soft snow while the stiffness still let you really rip the turns on the groomers (which all Killington was).
The Magfire is pretty fat under foot, 82mm and have a 126mm shovel for a tip. Even with this wide base I could still pop quick slalom turns at high speed. The only time I felt the edge slipping was on high speed, off-angle turns. One downside: the ski’s a bit heavy, but I guess that’s what you get for getting a all-mountain almost race ski.
