Auto Road 411

[TheOctopus]

After my virgin experience in the snowfields this past weekend, I'm pretty excited to return for further adventures up there.

Seeking to maximize the effort-to-ski ratio, using the autoroad to access the East-side snowfields seems like a good play, and I understand this is common. What's the deal? Is it necessary until the road opens to the summit to make this worthwhile? Or is an opening of the road to a lower elevation sufficient? If so, what elevation?

Thanks for any comments, thoughts, advice, etc.

[SkiStooge]

Good questions. I've skiied using the road but it has always been AFTER it has officially opened for the year. I think that they discourage it's use for this purpose (i.e. before it opens officially) due to the fact that if the terrain were more easily accesible and the average low-experience skiier were to drop in from above without the fore-knowledge of terrain, conditions, hazards, obstacles, etc, there would probably be a pile of corpses rotting on the Floor by late-May. I volunteer sometimes and do trail clearing, maintainence, etc, near home and wouldn't want to have to haul out the stinking, rotten, bloated, fly-infested remains of the un-initiated. Seems like it would be sort of like skiing blindly off of cliffs, etc with NO idea of your landing area, runout, et al. Anyways, it's fun later in the season. Let me know what you find out. Thanks. Al

[jshefftz]

You can skin up the auto road during the winter, but you need to buy a Great Glen xc ski pass.
In the spring, you usually have a few-weeks window during which the open road provides effortless access to the summit yet the snowfields and airplane gully still have snow.
But for the first weekend the auto road is open, it's usually open only to treeline, which does pretty much nothing for skiing access.
(BTW, management is surprisingly ski friendly and very helpful over the phone re conditions in late spring.)