Just 35 minutes from my home near Boston and the first of my four-in-one-weekend greater Boston ski excursion.  Bradford is a great starter mountain for families wanting to get the skiing bug – and at Bradford you can get it “bad”.  They have a “ton” of ski camps, lessons and activities for young people – check it out on line.  They also have the most snow equipment per slope of any other mountain I skied this winter.  I counted at least eight – that’s right, 8, modern ski grooming cats – those big machines – for 7 slopes (each slope was about 1000 feet long).  I calculate that at one cat per 1000-foot slope that the entire mountain could be groomed twice in two hours!!  Plus, as you can see from the photos, they also have a virtual army of portable snow making machines.  This puts a new meaning to the phrase “tear up the slopes”.

Plus, for some extra color, – tucked away behind some old cars, overgrown alders and a fence of shipping pallets, about a hundred yards from the base of the mountain, is a Shetland pony poking its head out of an abandoned trucking container.  It was clear, upon visiting briefly with this docile animal that he clearly nonplussed by all the hubbub nearby.  This was among the more curious sights of my Winter Odyssey.