February 6, 2024 • It's #Adirondacks time! Americans seem to like to pave roads to the top of their high peaks... Graylock in Mass, Washington in New Hamphsire and Whiteface, in New York... The toll road to the top of Whiteface is closed for the season and completely covered in snow. How better to spend the day than skin up to the top and enjoy the views. On the right, the ridge offers panorama of the ADK's High Peaks and Lake Placid, and on the left the Olympic ski resort. Made a new friend on the way up, learned a ton... Overall great day!
Whiteface Mountain located in Adirondacks is the fifth highest mountain of New York state.
The memorial highway that leads to its peak was built in 1936, 20 years before the ski area on
Whiteface opened. The trail is over five miles long and takes you to the height of almost 4,900 feet.
It's a tall road, in the summer the cars can come up here,
but in the winter you get a fat bike or skin up and skin down.
So there's these two turns and then it goes down towards the gate.
This kind of stuff is nice to ski, there's not enough snow now.
Then you wind up.
And it's like this, like you're skiing off the mountain, it just goes on and on and on.
And Phil is just like blasting, just doing, you know, beautiful turns, off he goes.
And at some point the guys are getting worried, like, will this back up?
I'm going, don't worry, I'm sure Phil has a plan.
We finally get to the bottom, his plan was to go back up.
I was sure it was going to come out in a road and, you know,
he knew the farmer or something, he was going to pay him and drive us back.
So today we are at Whiteface, New York.
We're at the top and we lucked out, it's a beautiful bluebird.
They predicted a lot of wind, but we don't have wind.
Everything is just perfect.
I made a friend on the way up and he was a former skimo racer or something, so
he picked up the pace a little bit.
It was good, he pushed me even though I'm hurting a little.
The view is just beautiful.
Here on the range you can see the high peaks.
This is Lake Placid Lake and the town behind it is Lake Placid.
You might be able to see the Olympic jumps there.
On the other side of this house is the Whiteface Resort.
We were looking at the possibility of skiing through the woods and connecting with the slides.
Today the conditions were pretty awful on the slides.
It didn't look good at all.
Maybe we'll come back with two cars and climb up this way and ski it down that way
and just shuttle each other around.
It's a beautiful day.
Now we'll have to ski it down.
As for here, yeah, this is the fastest I've ever skied.
