Valentine’s week 2021 — Part 2: Maine resort skiing
While the last post had an adventure arc to narrate, resort skiing usually lack a tale to remember them for. So this post simply notes some highlights for future visits.
We bought the IKON pass this season which gave us access to both Sunday River and Sugarloaf in ME without requiring reservations beforehand. This allowed us to flexibly decide which day and which resort to go to at the last minute.
My main takeaway from the 4 days we spent in the resorts:
- While Sugarloaf has an awesome snowfield at the top (the only lift-access above tree line skiing on the east coast) and side country access with Burnt mountain, we did not enjoy it as much due to its downsides (see details below)
- Sunday River is great fun, would definitely go back
- East coast skiing is much more demanding than the west, the tree skiing is on another level of tight and relentless.
Sugarloaf
One of my favorite things about Sugarloaf is its logo. It captures its essence of being a single peak with alpine snowfield at the top while being classy and adorable. I really want a sticker of it 😂 along with my other favorite resort logo of Winter Park
Besides the logo, the second best thing about Sugarloaf is the alpine snowfield. While skiing off it was fantastic — it was steep and smooth without being icy, we were disappointed that the lift design makes it impossible to lap the snowfield and ski its different lines. After skiing down it once, it requires multiple lifts up and down to get back to the Timberline lift.
The other interesting thing about Sugarloaf is the sidecountry access to Burnt mountain. We skied down Bracket basin (all tree skiing but very tracked out) to Upper Log Yard and transitioned to skin up Burnt mountain from there. It took about an hour to the patrol house at 3268 ft (about 1300ft vertical up and 1.5 miles). The uphill trail is along the snowcat tracks and some parts were too steep to be enjoyable for uphill climbing.
Perhaps because Burnt mountain is also accessed through the cat skiing, the tracks in the glades were also relatively tracked out (a bit less than Bracket). Because of that, it felt that we did all the hard work of climbing up, without much of the benefits of less tracked downhill trails. Maybe it’d be more fun on powder day.
When we skied down Burnt mountain, the trails were also difficult to navigate after the Upper Log Yard. We ended up missing the trail that will get us back to the parking lot, and instead slid all the way down and had to take the super slow triple Snubber back to parking. The silver lining here is that because there’s a single base area, we didn’t have to further traverse to get to the parking from there.
Sunday River
We spent 3 days at Sunday River on this trip and had a great time. Even though 2/16 Tuesday was the only day where we got some non-negligible fresh snow (a meager 2 inches the night before, while the rest of country got dumped on for the week), the conditions and coverage was solid — all the runs were open including glades and all the double blacks, and steeps and moguls were only icy in small patches. The waits for lifts and food were fairly short even with social distancing restrictions applied, although granted we were only there on weekdays. Although there are 8 different peaks, it’s fairly easy to move from/to different areas with multiple options (well designed lifts trail structure).
Runs
Favorite run: Eureka off Oz — open moguls all the way down, less icy than its parallels
Favorite tree run: Blind Ambition (enter through Lallopalooza near Jordan Bowl)
Least favorite tree run: Poppy Fields (trees so tight) Flying Monkey (full of shrubs sticking out) off Oz
Lifts
Least crowded lift: Oz Quad
Longest wait lift: Jordan Bowl Express
Most unique: the Chondola lift has a mix of gondola and chairlifts, and has separate lines to wait for each
Food options
Best lunch we had: Korean taco bowl special+ clam chowder at Foggy Goggle at South Ridge base. The social distancing was well enforced with tables spaced very apart.
Lunch option to try next time: The Mountain Room on the top of North peak is a fancy chef restaurant that was apparently booked months in advance (covid social distance probably drastically reduced its capacity). Next time, reserve on OpenTable during trip planing.
