With this post we travel out of North Carolina and begin to explore my more recent ski trips. Over winter break I joined the Penn State Snowboard Club on their winter trip to Quebec City in Canada. My first international trip without my family was definitely a terrifying experience, but being able to go with my friends and club was an incredible time. While our original plans included going to Mt. Saint Anne ski resort as well, a lot of drama and controversy surrounding that resort at the time forced us to remain at Stoneham for the four days we were there. While it was a bummer not being able to go, this news article definitely clues you into how grateful I am to not have gone.
Stoneham Mountain was the first northern mountain that I had ever actually snowboarded, given the fact that Colorado had me remain on the bunny slopes as I learned. I was incredibly shocked by the breadth of this mountain, and how the trails were actually longer than ten minutes. One thing that Mt. Stoneham has under its belt is long, breezy trails that can last you for 25-30 minutes if you take your time.
This resort had beautiful weather the entire time, with two out of our four days being actively snowing. The powder on the surface was built up really nicely for the first half of the day, and only became noticably icy near the end (this is still the East Coast, folks!). While the entire right side of the mountain was closed, the majority of the runs on the left face and middle face were open, giving us a lot of room to explore and try out different things. The lifts were also a lot more developed and faster than my North Carolina mountains, which was definitely an added bonus as we were able to spend more time riding instead of sitting.
One confusing aspect of being on this mountain was the trail map: even though I was fully aware of Quebec province being French-speaking, our group was incredibly thrown off by the fact that the trail maps, directions to lodges, and even the trail names were all in French. We were morally required to take a picture next to the “La Rock-N-Roll” slope.
Overall, this northern mountain definitely holds to both standards of East-Coast skiing and Canadian skiing. This large mountain definitely kept us entertained for more than one day, but still fell short in aspects like difficulty and quality of snow that we had come to expect in East Coast mountains.
In the next post, I’ll talk about my first trip to a PA mountain: Seven Springs. Stay tuned! (^: