It was Jay Peak’s trees—and the fact that they were opened up for play—that really put it on the map.
It was Jay Peak’s trees—and the fact that they were opened up for play—that really put it on the map.
JAY PEAK
RECOMMENDED BY John Witherspoon
Jay Peak has wound its way around John “Spoon” Witherspoon’s life for almost forty years. “I got my start at Jay, though it happened by accident,” Spoon recalled. “I was born in Southern California into a decidedly non-skiing family. Through a string of events, my hippie mom ended up in northern Vermont. Though it was 1972, the sixties were still rolling up there; it’s the land that time forgot. She ended up taking a job at the old Jay Peak Hotel. Since she was an employee, I got to ski. That got the ball rolling. Eventually, I started teaching at Jay. Not much later, I followed the ski profession out west. I was out there almost twenty years. I was living in Tahoe when I decided to wrap it up on the pro tour and come back home. In many respects, it’s pretty much the way I left it.”
Jay Peak sits at the northern end of the Green Mountains, some eighty miles northeast of Burlington and a stone’s throw from the border with Quebec; some weekends, you may find almost as many Montrealeans as Vermonters on the hill, and both American and Canadian currency are accepted. Named for one of the adjacent towns, which in turn was named for the great New York statesman and first chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay, the peak has gained notoriety as home of the East Coast’s most substantial snowfall. Jay Peak (with a summit of 3,968 feet) averages a Rockies-like 376 inches of snow annually … almost nine feet more than New Hampshire’s Mount Washington. (In 2007/8, Jay reported a whopping 419 inches.)
Though many things around Jay hadn’t changed over the years that Spoon was away, there was one great transformation: the legitimization and even promotion of tree skiing. “For me, there’s a great appeal to skiing the trees,” Spoon continued. “It’s what Mother Nature intended: Here’s a mountain, here’s some snow, go ahead. No groomed trails, no gates, no snowmaking. That sense of being in the woods speaks to me in the same way big-mountain skiing does—it’s skiing au naturel. When I left Vermont to head out west, tree skiing was forbidden at Jay. If you got caught, there would be trouble. Over the past twenty years, they not only began to allow glade skiing, but started creating glades and marketing their presence. Jay has so much space with open hardwood forests and good pitch. It’s the kind of environment where you can get way off the trails and get back, or get way out and stay out. When Jay first changed its policies, there was a great outcry in the industry: ‘You’re sending people into the woods and they’re gonna get killed!’ Actually, it has gone really well, and now many other mountains have followed suit. Having the trees opened up at Jay gave me something new to explore on my old mountain.”
Jay has not only helped popularize glade skiing, the resort has also developed a ski school program to help acclimatize newbies to the trees. “Not surprisingly, a lot of people are daunted by the trees,” Spoon said. “I see a lot of people who aren’t regulars at Jay. They peer into the glades and then keep going. I’ve even had very talented skiers—Level II Canadian ski instructors—who couldn’t ski the trees. They were great carvers, but carving has nothing to do with skiing in the woods. There, you need a more controlled, skidded turn. I call it ‘schmearing.’” (Ski writer Matt Boxler has likened the schmear turn to “a knife scraping warm butter across a piece of toast.”) “I also like to teach the hop turn.” (The hop turn, incidentally, was pioneered at Jay by Walter Foeger, an Austrian who was instrumental both in fashioning Jay’s first trails and in running the early ski education program.) “People who’ve been working so hard at carving, and may have spent hundreds [or thousands] of dollars in lessons to perfect their form are, understandably, a little resistant. The truth is, you don’t have to be an amazing skier to effectively ski the trees. If you’re a green-trail skier, we have green woods. If we have an intermediate guy, we can take him into thicker trees that aren’t too steep. Of course, if you’re more experienced in the glades, we can take you to some gnarly terrain.”
One of Spoon’s most-recommended Jay Peak tree areas is Beaver Pond Glades. “It’s one of the first places they cut when they were creating new glades,” Spoon said, “and the cool thing is that it’s so wide. The top is pretty steep, but you can cut in lower and take the more pitched parts out of the equation. It’s at the edge of the boundary, and you can find a lot of good snow in there.” If you do extremely well in Spoon’s class—or come into Jay as a skilled glade-iator—you might graduate to Timbuktu, Valhalla, and Beyond Beaver Pond Glade. Jay certainly has its share of challenging inbounds terrain, too. “I like a trail called Staircase,” Spoon said. “It’s really steep and narrow—a tier of rocks, like giant stairs. If one or two people have gotten there before you, it’s not very good. If you’re one of the first few people, you’re loving it.” When you’re done playing in Jay’s trees (or on the stairs), the retreat of choice is The Belfry. “It’s an old one-room schoolhouse, halfway down the access road to town,” John added. “It has an old-time lodge feel. There aren’t any televisions. It’s a conversation bar.”
In his recent years back at Jay, Spoon has taken on coaching the kid’s free-ski team. It’s been a full circle, of sorts. “When I started coaching, the kids weren’t superstrong,” Spoon said. “They were inching their way along. Then we got two big powder days in a row, fifty inches of snow. There’s a little spot that’s out-of-bounds where there are some cliffs. I took them back there after that big snow, and the kids were launching themselves off the biggest cliff, stomping the landings clean and rolling out. I was floored. I didn’t have a coach when I was growing up. As a young kid, I didn’t even realize that there was such a thing as ski racing, though we couldn’t have afforded a racing coach anyway. By getting into the industry, I kind of circumnavigated not having a coach when I was a kid. Now I enjoy sharing a little of the knowledge that I gained in my competitive years. Watching the kids that day and seeing how far they’d come was incredibly gratifying.”
JOHN “SPOON” WITHERSPOON is a veteran of the Freeskiing World Tour and head freeskiing coach at Jay Peak.
If You Go
Getting There: Jay Peak is seventy miles north of Burlington, Vermont, which is served by many carriers.
Season: Jay generally is open from Thanksgiving to early May.
Lift Tickets: Day tickets run $69; multi-day tickets are available.
Level of Difficulty: Jay’s seventy-eight trails are rated as 20 percent novice; 40 percent intermediate; 40 percent advanced.
Accommodations: Jay Peak Resort (800-451-4449; www.jaypeakresort.com) has a variety of lodging options.
