Timberline and Blue Knob?

I guess I could ask the same question about a number of other resorts, but on paper, it would seem that these two are very similar to one another. Both have ~1000 ft of vertical, both are older, skier-oriented mountains, and, for me, both are (according to google maps) approx 3 hours away +/- 25 minutes or so. They both claim around 30-ish runs, and seem to be about the same size in acreage.

So, what's the difference?

(Feel free to introduce other similar but different comparisons!)


aaron

In my opinion, terrain style. T-line goes for the newer, fall-line type skiing that came to the east in the mid-80s, whereas Blue Knob generally has more traditionally trail skiing- twisty, windy, occasionally narrow, lots of glades. Route 66 is simply not the same as White Lightning, Shortway ain't The Drop, etc, and T-line as nothing like D-Trail (this isn't even including the glades).

BK has two faces that their slopes pitch off of, T-line pretty much just one. BK really only comes to life with natural snow, T-line can do it on manmade snow but you have to be patient with them, as it takes a while for them to cover the slopes. Both have somewhat limited amenities, though the T-line lodge is in better shape. The wind can whip you at either mountain, but since you have to start and stop in it at BK, it can really be overwhelming there on a cold day. BK doesn't get as much snow but probably holds the base a little more consistently on account of being about 80 aeronautical miles further north.

BK is probably more of a skiers' mountain- less forgiving, more demanding of your skills. Bring your rock skis if you go though- think surface is common on the natural snow runs.

Thanks Roger I was wondering the same thing and that was a great summary.

Just out of curiosity do you travel from Kansas to the mid-atlantic often? Just my opinion but if you lived in Kansas wouldn't it be easier and more fun to go to Denver or Utah? Please don't take that the wrong way I'm sure people who know you are glad you participate in this community, but a guys gotta ask.

Aaron, I don't think Tline has anything that compares to Extrovert. BK has lots of twisting, intersecting trails while tline is laid out more down the fall line. The 1000' at BK includes a long run out at the bottom, timberline not so much. I think the lift lines at BK are not as bad as Tline.

Disclaimer: Familiarity breeds contempt; i've skied three days total at Blue Knob and i suspect i've caught them when it's almost as good as they get. I've been skiing tline for the last 12 years, it's my home hill. I'd recommend you try them both, they are two of what bushwackerinPA used to call the "Skiers Three", Laurel Mountain being the other but you'll have to wait til next year to ski that one.

Roger Z. nailed it. I'll just highlight what I think are the main differences.

• Timberline gets more natural snow. The snow conditions (groomed trails, trails and glades) are generally better at T-Line. Blue Knob tends to be icier. More snow means the glades at T-Line are skiable more frequently.
• Many of the glades at Blue Knob are over-thinned and due to logging and poor maintenance, very rocky. I'd never take anything but rock skis into the glades at BK.
• Despite the protests here on DCSki, T-Line has better snowmaking than BK. The bases are much deeper on the trails; rocks on the trails at T-Line are pretty uncommon.
• Blue Knob has many more natural snow trails (no snowmaking at all.) When the conditions are right, these are some of the very best trails in the Mid-Atlantic.
• Timberline has better grooming. Timberline may over groom at times; Blue Knob will tend to under groom (generally a good thing.)
• The terrain at Blue Knob is the most challenging (snow conditions play a part) in the Mid-Atlantic.
• Blue Knob is an upside-down resort (lodge on top.)
• Blue Knob is a bit closer (from Annandale, VA under 3 hrs) with mostly highway driving. It is a lot more conducive to day trip from DC.

Throw in Laurel Mountain and maybe Canaan Valley, and these areas are by far my favorites in the Mid-Atlantic.

You posted this while I was posting, and I couldn't agree more.

Has there been enough natural snow this year for BK to "be alive"?

I only have one pair of skis, so with apologies to Jimmy, "they ARE my rock skis... and my powder skis... and my rain skis... and my...." If I'm going to have to stick to 1 or 2 runs because the coverage is no good, then it's probably not worth the drive. Based on the pictures from last weekend, thought, things look pretty good, right?


aaron

aaron the conditions on the groomed trails with snowmaking last weekend were just fine; if you're wondering about Blue Knob this weekend i must ask you

HAVE YOU LEFT YET?

The natural snow trails seem to have been open only a few days this year. We skied one of them near the end of Sunday, but the others were closed. One or two may have been closed because there was a bit of a crust due to the warm snow/possible bit of rain from the previous Friday. (The crust wasn't an issue on the snowmaking trails with the exception of the sides of Extrovert.)

Coverage is currently very good on the snowmaking trails, with the exception of Lower Extrovert which had a line across the trail of dirt and brush exposed. It wasn't too rocky though. Not sure if they've made snow it on this past week.

Some samples of the snowmaking trails you can ski:
Upper/Lower Extrovert - Double Black, toughest trail in the Mid-Atlantic
Stembogan - Black, open steep bowl at the top, twisty trail at the bottom with some interesting terrain variation to play with
High Hopes - Narrow groomed Black
Deer Run - Black/Blue, surprisingly steep, wide, with bumps on one side
Expressway - Blue
Jack Rabbit - Green but it is still fun for an advanced skier to ski (it would almost be a blue at Whitetail)
Mambo Alley - Twisty green, almost a bob sled run

I don't think anyone would get bored skiing that roster of trails. We didn't over the course of a weekend. When I go to Whitetail, at most I'm skiing 6 or 7 trails in one day.

Question, is the Twister -> Winterset trail as long as it looks on the map? The map makes it seem like it could be almost as long as Salamander.

If Extrovert, high hopes, and Stembogan are open with good coverage BK is hard to beat for an advanced skier looking for a challenge. BK skis totally different than T-Line. BK is steeper and has tighter trails. T-Line is much more open slopes. T-line gets more snow, and is at higher elevation. BK is more of a northerly aspect than tline and it stays much colder than the surrounding areas up on the Allegheny ridge. I prefer the on piste offerings at BK, but TLine has more snow and better snow making and more reliable tree skiing.

Hi Noopie I lived in the Mid-A for all but undergrad and a year of my first job from age 8 to 31, so about 20 years total. After moving out here, I travelled back to the Mid-A to visit my girlfriend->fiancee (now wife, but she is in El Salvador), and my parents still live in Deale, MD. But I am wending my way westward, via a strange detour to KC, which I am enjoying immensely except for the lack of big mountains.

That said, assuming I stay here through next winter there's a 90% chance I'm going to start my certification for ski patrol at the local hill. I skied there for the first time on Sunday (Snow Creek, MO) and despite the lack of vertical I had a blast- met 11 people and just generally had a good time. Snow Creek is an ideal place to learn to ski, the kind of place a lot of us learned on, and has a lot of good deals for groups, beginners, etc. It ain't Blue Knob, it ain't Timberline, but it's not nothing and that's something, anyway.

I've wanted to do ski patrol for a while and passed the initial test at Whitetail, but it was too far of a drive at the time. Anyway, I hope it works out because it'd be fun to do next winter and would really help pay for Sandra's (my wife's) learn-to-ski lessons, since they'd be free!

BK vs. Tline- I think the conditions on any given weekend should determine where to go. If the natural snow is good I'd choose BK, otherwise you probably want to go with the Valley (that said, Canaan is another ski area that is a blast when there's natural snow but so-so without it, I think).

Twister's a nice intermediate trail. Top half is more difficult than any part of Salamander, bottom half is similar to Sally. Overall a little shorter.
Elevation at base of TL is same as summit of BK, which gives it the feel of a more northern latitude. I haven't seen TL when all the woods are open. When all of BK is open it has a pretty good gnar factor for the mid-Atlantic.

Roger, have fun on your trip. I'm jealous, it would be awesome to travel west and ski as you go. Best of luck with Ski Patrol.

Hey Aaron i guess we all forgot to mention another difference the access road to Timberline is a green circle and the road to Blue Knob is a double diamond.

Not even close, most of the good stuff wasn't skiable, and conditions were less than excelent.

[quote=scootertig...both are older, skier-oriented mountains...[/quote]

I thought Timberline was one of the newest ski resorts in the region.

I found more of interest at Canaan (thanks to a helpful local telemarker who took the bait when I told him I thought Timberline was a little better. We skied a lot of fun lines, untracked open fields, tight trees, climbing over logs at times, and on a previous visit I found untracked off the back of Canaan on my own. Canaan seemed more the "skier's mountain" to me than Timberline. But I've never been guided to the goods at Timberline. I went in some trees between the trails at Timberline, promptly got my ticket marked which scored me cred at Whitegrass when we went there for dinner that night.

I'm sure you did get some cred for that one. Timberline's ski patrol absolutely hates it when anyone but their own skis their lines in the woods. No really, that's the first I've ever heard of that happening at TL. Especially weird since you were telemarking (I'm assuming).....

Rod, I had a powder day in the valley last March, and went to Canaan on the advice of some here that it wouldn't track out as quick as Timberline. That was great advice. I was skiing fresh lines all day long, in fact I cut my own tracks in the parking lot at the end of the day when I skied back to my car. I think Canaan would bore me on a normal day, but on that powder day it was an awesome place to ski. The meadows were great and some of the trails in the middle of the mountain were a real treat. I think CV has a rustic charm that pairs up perfectly with a no frills get to the goods powder day. I don't think I saw more than 25-30 skiers all day long.

I went to TL the next day with David, and had some great groomed skiing, but the remaining powder was chopped to shreds. They obviously had a lot more traffic than CV on the day of the snow storm.

[quote=RodSmith ..... But I've never been guided to the goods at Timberline. I went in some trees between the trails at Timberline, promptly got my ticket marked which scored me cred at Whitegrass when we went there for dinner that night. [/quote]

I've never heard of anyone getting their ticket marked at Tline for skiing the trees. Last season, I was way back in the woods when a patroler came up behind me while I was scouting out my line. We chit chated for a few minutes and then continued on our way. Not a word about being OB.

There must have been another reason.......

ok ok let's get something else going - so wanna talk about carving? check this dude out :

layin' out

Look at how floppy the guy's outside/downhill ski is in turns. I realize that is extreme carving, but it's not good carving. It is a great example to talk about edging though.

In a turn, pressure/weight on the edges depends on upper body position and centripetal acceleration. A good ski racer can have their body way to the inside of the edges because they are going very fast and making relatively short radius turns. Both of these things result in high centripetal acceleration (V^2/R). As a result, the body can move way to the inside of the edges and still create strong edging pressure.

If you go slower, or make longer turns, the centripetal acceleration drops off and edging pressure is a lot more dependent on upper body position. Generally, the upper body needs to be closer to, maybe in between, the ski edges in order to put some weight/pressure on them. Most people have a more upright, centered body in these situations.

In this case, I think the goal must have been to lay out the body in turns (to look cool), but the guy is not going fast enough or turning a tight enough radius to put the upper body that far inside the skis and still maintain good weight/pressure on the downhill/outside ski. The result is that horrible looking, floppy downhill ski. The skiing is not great, but it makes for a good physics discussion for nerds like me!

I think he's overcooking his turns and sliding out too much; his skis aren't holding their line that well -- it looks cool but that's it.

Obviously I'm such an expert, I'd know! :-)

.. heh well he *is* fighting a lot of boot-out ... but yeah his outside ski really isn't reverse-camber-ing at the end of the turn ... if u saw the latest ski mag on "cult of carving" the pics look like they complete on their tails (lots of daylight between the shovel and the snow) ... so ...

but i believe this is a good example of euro-fun "body carving" ... basically u use the inside ski mostly ... but i have 2 say that inside ski is carving good!

This discussion is worthless without a free body diagram!

Sorry, engineering/physics joke.

But sadly, I really do think of these sort of things when I ride. Fortunately the analysis is much easier for a boarder than it is for you 2-plankers.

.. oh goody i started a new discussion ...

here is another one ... same idea u turn on the inside ski and lay down ... this seems real popular now ...

YABC (yet another body carver)

OH i love to carve big fat turns on the groomers & teh slush bumps. Notice he's got no poles, thats something i've been meaning to work into my drill program but i keep forgetting to remembering to forget my poles.

.. actually, it's really an extremely exaggerated (hmm nice alliterated hyperbole there) drill i've heard friends talk about ... my friends that are trying to make more new-school turns ... they have you point your inside hand/arm forward and into the turn to put more weight on the inside and get your inside ski to carve ... if you look at the second one the behind-shot shows it ... if it didn't look like it would totally trash my knees i'd be out trying it now it looks fun ...

I've never heard of anyone getting their ticket marked at Tline for skiing the trees. Last season, I was way back in the woods when a patroler came up behind me while I was scouting out my line. We chit chated for a few minutes and then continued on our way. Not a word about being OB.

There must have been another reason.......


[/quote]

HA yup gotta be another reason ....... maybe they were jealous of the sweetness of TRodSmith's tele groovin style


Groovin'.. on a Winter afternoon
UHOH couldn't get away too soon

There ain't a place i'd like to be except
Groovin'

I've never heard of it either x cept when jimmy and I got bored doin laps on opening day a few years back and the rustys didn't have anything better to do. Usually, they're the first into the trees and will track out fresh lines first. Maybe they thought you were going to poach their favorite line....
"almost poached your line....it happened just the other day..."

Sadly, that's not a joke in my case!



I've been meaning to do a post on Epic that shows the effect of ski width and binding lift on edging, and drew a bunch of cartoons. Haven't had time to write it all up yet.

By the way, I show the centripetal acceleration in the sketch above, but it's generally replaced by an equivalent outward pseudo force (centrifugal force) in most analyses.

Dork out.

Whoah!!!!! That's way too geeky for me. I'm one of those "do it if it feels good" people. Besides, life's too short!

O boy i just love a sing along kim




your line was gettin kinda thin.......but the tree never got in my way

but i'm not givin in, an inch, to fear
cause i'm offpiste myself again this year
i feeeel, like i owe it, to someoooone

... u forgot something - spinal aligment .. ie a banked position vs. lots of hip angulation. important because it puts the center of mass farther inside when u bank. it creates a moment around around your "e's" ... you're more angulated with hip angulation, but banking allows your CM to travel in a straighter line.

in fact i see a lot of analysis based on a simple vector decomposition (W and a) and i think it's not really correct; the ski edge acts as a hinge or pivot about which a moment is generated, the moment of course being determined by how far the body's mass is hangin' inside .. ie. if i bank i put more weight in farther over. if i put more weight in i resist turn forces more, thus i have to angulate less. the turning force in this model is equivalent to the torque it would take, applied along perhaps the outside edge, to keep the skier from falling in on the hip.

the equation becomes just a little more complex, and i guess u would treat the body as a distributed load, but it would give another parameter to play with .

... but ahhh when i ski i don't think of that crap ... it just feels right if i start with a bank and end with hip anglulation (or not).

I think the way you add in the "angulation" of your body is by including the delta-x and delta-y between the CG and the pivot point (probably easiest to sum moments (torque) about the edge of the inside ski). Gravity is acting to rotate the skier to the ground and the centrifugal force is acting to flip the skier over her skis. The lever arm for gravity is the lateral distance between the inside edge and her CG. The lever arm for the centrifugal force is the vertical distance from her inside edge to her CG. In general the moment created by the centrifugal force is greater and you have to apply pressure to your outside ski to keep from flipping over. However, if you really carve hard, like the skier in the video, your CG moves further inboard and closer to the snow such that the moments about your inside ski created by gravity almost equals that created by the centrifugal force and you don't require much of a counteracting force by the outside ski.

It feels liberating to let the inner-geek out of the closet every once and a while.

Hey, I just proved to myself that skiing is way easier than boarding. Boarders have to perfectly balance the moments created by gravity and centrifugal force because they don't have another plank to make up for any difference. That skiing stuff must be easy!

I agree on the angulation but I lump that into upper body position. In my head, I am pushing hips into the hill and upper body out over the hill (down the fall line) when I turn.

As for the torque, you can put in a torque around the ski edges and sum up the effects of all the forces and their lever arms to get the torque that the skier has to supply to stay in equilibrium, I just happen to focus on forces here. When doing the analysis, I found the torque is only a factor when initially edging the ski (and it's also where ski width and binding lift come into play). At higher edge angles and speeds, the torque goes to zero (or near zero) when a skier does everything right. In a good carve, a skier can balance weight and centripetal acceleration to stay up nice and smooth. And we don't often think about it -- our body handles that balance very elegantly (far more elegantly than the equations!).

....It was getting kinda of deep..... coulda said it wasn't my way...

Intuitively I would think you'd want the load on both skis to be the same -- that to me would allow one to carry the highest loads through a turn more efficiently than having one load higher on one ski..

So the "inside" ski loaded turn is kinda cool looking (as you can really lay out 'over' the inside ski) and on the other hand, most folks probably put either a little or a lot more load on the outside ski...

BUT in terms of efficiency, it would seem like splitting the load 50/50 per ski would be best and ultimately lead to more efficient turns at higher speed...

Once again, my expertise in this fields compels me to say this... ;-)

I think ski instruction advocates more of an even balance these days, with a more of an open stance and less emphasis on the downhill ski. Maybe an instructor can chime in. I know when I was taught, we all had a tight parallel and most of our weight on that downhill ski. It's not really practical all the time, especially with modern skis.

.. (ahem) the idea is to add -via a calculate cg (so calculate the cg ..and it comes to what? yeah ohh the distributed load of the body which really is proportionally related to the integral of the symmetrical profile of the body divided along its axis times the average density of the human body... have you calculated it yet .. damn it why not!??!!) and therefor both spinal angle relative to the normal of the skis plays an important role ..


and g'd i don't still give a crap about this when i ski

and p.p.s actually everything i wrote is technically correct.

It may be faster to ski on one ski only vs two thru a turn ALL OTHER THINGS BEING equal.

However, I think its likely that as the load goes up thru a turn, one ski slides out before two will -- that is if the load is distributed on two.

Therefore I think two skis should be faster as loads increase beyond what you can hold with just one ski...

And everything else being equal...

Certainly it seems likely that air resistance is the great limiter as the speed goes above 20mph even... beating out friction between the ski & snow.

It seems all that should be true assuming that you want to ski as fast as possible -- and need to use some turning to maintain control. Otherwise you could just ski straight down the side of the mountain -- that would be faster, and if you lift one ski up off the snow -- faster still (assuming there's no air resistance penality for that maneuver which there probably is in reality).

Wow, this thread is ever evolving. How long till it goes this far?

got to include the exponential decay damping factor of the legs and knees, which will affect the rotational forces. the arc down a mountain is not really ever a piece of a regular circle, more like green's theorem for line integrals I would think. so much fun. from a theorist's point of view, for modeling time down the mountain, first order approximation is straight downhill followed by higher order terms for the extra distance covered in contours and arcs, and then additional edge friction, and then rotational inertia, and so on. Then you can start adding effects such as edge angle variations and stance for effect analysis. Probably been done a 1000 times by grad students in Vermont.

or maybe not

.. heh oh god i roll over and give up! u are the greatest nerd (genuflexion) !

"you, who are on the road,
must have a code that u can live by

I am in the presence of those with PHDs of verbal ambiguity, I am not worthey!

I knew there would be trouble when I put up that diagram! Dave wins for sure, with the invocation of Green's Theorem...

any particular route a skier takes down a ski run is surely some piecewise polynomial (spline)... 999999 out 1000000 runs.