Mansfield Nordic Club

After last weekend’s awesome tour of the fall colors and scenes of Pleasant Valley and Smuggler’s Notch, the Junior team spent this week enjoying more autumn scenes and leaves.

We’re taking a bit of a ‘deep breath’ before a busy two weeks ahead. These next two weeks of hard fall training will be bound together by the first-ever “Tour De Pug”, a multi-stage tour:

But before we get to the busy race schedule of the Tour, here are some clips and shots from another great week of training. We had an easy week overall and had a few non-training activities to take advantage…

U16 pumpkin carving at the Range…we left our art on some stumps trailside and when CSU arrived for a training camp on Friday they confirmed the pumpkins were still there!

A little uphill ski bounding in Westford…followed by brunch at Coach Adam’s house! Ben and Greg were in the area to join us for this one!

This morning, a few of us joined in with the CSU team for a hike up Mt Mansfield. The large Boston ski club was up at the Range for a small training camp and some leaf-peeping. We got to tag along as they experienced some fine VT hiking trails, wet slippery rocks, and Canadian tourists…Quincy had the quote of the day: “don’t they have the same kind of trees in Quebec??”

Eliza leaping some rocks on the way up

Quick water break

Trying to get Quincy up high so she can enjoy the amazing views

Selfie upon completion

Final little bit of media: some clips of V1 work on Pit Loop!

Are you a Junior skier looking to get on snow this Thanksgiving? Our popular training camp at Craftsbury still has some spots available! See the webpage HERE for more details…we’d love to have you join us on the snow this November!

Sunday mornings are usually a pretty small affair for the MNC junior crew. When I realized that there’d be a pretty experienced group of only four of us for this week’s final rollerski, I decided we’d take on a bigger challenge.

Instead of the typical out-and-back along Pleasant Valley Road, I met Will Solow at the highest parking lot at Smuggs for a car-drop. We’d end our ski with the long, gradual climb up the base of the notch. This was the perfect way to cap off a long volume week amid changing foliage and amazing scenery.

Passing a very quaint mill building

If you’ve never at least driven through Pleasant Valley, you owe yourself the trip! It is one of the most picture-perfect postcard Vermont locales. We barely saw any cars for the first portion of our ski, although once we began to climb the Notch we were swarmed by throngs of leaf-peepers from New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Near the top one car even slowed down next to me and rolled down the window. I was ready to receive the typical rollerski quip of “hey there’s no snow yet” or something similar, but it turned out to be Jim and JoAnn rooting us on!

Speaking of more roads, we ventured up to Road 101 during our ski, site of some striding intervals earlier this summer. What we came across today was amazing fresh pavement…this might just be the best rollerski road in VT right now!

Can’t beat this stuff!

In total our rollerski was 3 hours long, covering multiple towns and many, many feet of vertical climbing (waiting for the report from Sara’s Garmin). The cider doughnuts I brought and left waiting at the top were a welcome sight!

Replenishing some calories!