Fun & Fitness over 50

Today Mrs. MTBMan1 and I went to Stratton Mountain in Vermont for a day of skiing.
First of all, this cost us nothing except the gas to get there, courtesy Warren Miller .
Warren Miller creates a ski movie every year and they have special showings around the country.
For the price of the movie ticket ($22) you get 4 or 5 free lift tickets plus other goodies like a subsciption to Ski Magazine.
This was a great day. Temps went up in to the 30s. Blue skies. Not too crowded. They've had a great snow season so the snow was superb.

We drove out to the area they call the Sun Bowl and wound up spending the whole day there. It's nice because you can park right by the lodge whereas in lots 1 and 2 you have to shuttle over to the main lodge area and then hike a considerable distance through the resort village.
Plus, it's sunny! :-)

We did 2 green trail runs to warm up on Lower Middlebrook (indicated by the yellow line over on the left)

This trail is OK if the snow is not too cruddy and heavy which it wasn't. It's mostly a series of rollers. The only downside is the long slow runout at the end. Eventually you are hoofin' it up to the liftline.

After that we tried Churchill Downs to Lower Kidderbrook which we had never done before.



This is a great run. Fast and the grooming was excellent all day. The only drawback, again, is that it eventually joins Middlebrook and you have that long runout and pole or hike back to the lift line.

After sufficient warmup, we hit the blues. When you get off the Sunrise Express lift, Sunriser Supertrail is just to the left.



Of course, being a blue, it's a much steeper trail. But it was very doable since the snow was still fairly soft and because weekday traffic is relatively light, the grooming held up.
Access to the new half-pipe



is on the lower part of this trail. We actually went through it at the end of the day but barely went up the sides! We're not freestyle ready!

The next trail we tried was Lower DownEaster.



This was our favorite. It was fast, groomed well and interesting in that it had a lot of variety, side-slanted slopes and steeps with a fast runout at the end that, thankfully, allowed us to coast right up to the lift line.

One other blue we tried today was Gentle Ben



which we were not too crazy about. The start is steep and very cruddy. Then it levels out for along ways and finally winds along a fairly narrow track with crud that wasn't too fast, so you wanted to go straight out but then your ski edge would tend to catch in the crud and go where you did not want it to go. Not too pleasant. It was a long run!

All in all, we tore up the day. Probably did more skiing in one day than we ever have done. Haven't been this sore since I started skiing 3 years ago! :-) Stratton has some great blue trails on Sun Bowl. We highly recommend them!

Here's some video from today: