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Snowball and Spring Fling can also claim a direct connection to ski-racing history. In 1997, the King of the Mountain downhill series—featuring such Olympic gold medalists as Austria’s Franz Klammer, Switzerland’s Pirmin Zurbriggen, and the United States’s Bill Johnson—came to Sugarbush. Snowball and Spring Fling, that classic cruising run, became recast as a high-speed downhill course. On a bluebird day in early February, more than 2,000 race fans surrounded the finish area to watch the legends of the sport do their high-speed thing. At times exceeding seventy mph and launching off a man-made jump at the bottom—soaring right over a sponsor’s SUV in the process— the racers got from the start, at the Valley House chair summit, to the finish in less than fifty-five seconds. (Please—do not try this on your next Sugarbush visit …) A year later, while racing in the same event, former Olympian Doug Lewis, a Mad River Valley resident, careened into a frightening, windmilling crash about halfway down Spring Fling, luckily surviving unscathed. Kind of cool, really, that such intermediate runs have been able to put some of the greatest racers in history to a stern test. Put another way, steepness alone doesn’t define the nuances of adventure woven into Sugarbush’s varied terrain. Consider Upper Jester, the gentle run descending from the Lincoln Peak summit. While barely railroad grade in pitch, it makes up for lack of steepness with the route-finding puzzle presented by its zigzagging course back and forth across the fall line (apologies to Stein).
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Calculating Jester’s hairpins correctly, accurately judging the apex of each turn and the angles of entry and exit, can be a mental exercise comparable to charting the variables in a quadratic equation. Hit the line just right, and a crisp, parabolic arc through each bend is the reward. Miss the line, and speed-killing skids are the penalty. The line-finding conundrum is the same for all Jester skiers, experts and less experienced skiers alike.
“Sometimes, I have to stop, pause for a big breath, look around, and say, ‘Wow, this is a magical place.’ ” – Owner Win Smith on Slide Brook Nothing, however, characterizes adventure at present-day Sugarbush more definitively than foraging off-trail for tasty, untracked lines. “The secret stashes change all the time, depending on the sun, the snow, the wind, and the weather,” says Egan. “But there is always something out there in the trees.” And nowhere is that truer than in the 2,000-acre expanse of Slide Brook that forms a giant bowl beneath the long ridge connecting Castlerock Peak and Mt. Ellen. While technically in-bounds, this is wild country; in fact, Sugarbush is required by the state of Vermont to take several measures to mitigate impacts on what is known to be active bear habitat. No cut trails, no snowmaking or grooming, no