Day-9 Sep-13-09

We got up this morning and quickly realized that it had been raining. By the time we ate breakfast and loaded our luggage into the trailer, the rain had lessened to a drizzle. We planned to spend a good part of the day wandering around the sites at Lake Placid. So, we headed off to Whiteface Mountain, the home of the 1980 Olympic ski competition. At Whiteface, we took a ride in the "Cloud Splitter" gondola to the peak of Little Whiteface. Here are a couple of shots from Whiteface.

This is a shot of the main mountain face as you arrive at the resort.

This is a shot from inside the gondola car, looking back down at the base lodge and parking area. At this point, we are only about 1/3 of the way up.

This is Lennie, in the gondola, not looking amused, as I teased her about the car falling off of the cable and crashing down the mountainside :)

It was still fairly early, and the morning fog and clouds had not burned off yet. You can see the clouds still lingering at the peak of the mountain.

After Whiteface, we headed back into downtown Lake Placid, and drove around Mirror Lake. There are some very nice older hotels in the area.

There are also a lot of shopping opportunities.

The Olympic Center ice rink is located right in downtown.

After spending some time downtown, and eating lunch, we headed over to the ski jumping complex. You can see the two, huge jump towers from quite a distance.

They also had an aerial practice area at the jumping complex. This allows the freestyle skiers to practice their inverted tricks during the summer months. They ski down the jumps, off the ramps, and into a huge pool. While they are jumping, the operators blow bubbles in the pool, so that the jumpers can more easily spot their landing while inverted.

Here is one of the jumpers in the air.

After watching these jumpers for a while, it was time to head over to the huge jump towers. They have both a 90 meter, and a 120 meter jump at this complex. We took a quick chairlift ride to the top of the landing hill, and then rode an elevator to the top of the 120 meter jump.

Here is a look at the landing hill as we rode up the chairlift.

Here are the towers from the top of the chair lift.

This is a shot standing directly under the 120 meter jump ramp.

Here is a look at the smaller 90 meter tower, taken from the observation deck of the taller 120 meter tower. You can also see the judging tower about halfway down the landing hill. These things are HUGE. I cannot imagine what would possess anyone to want to jump off of these things !!!

It was really cool that you could walk right out onto the actual jump track !!! Here is a shot taken while standing right on the jump track itself.

The starting position on the jump track is adjustable, and was not completely at the top. The previous picture was taken looking DOWN the jump, this shot is looking UP at the the very top of the track. They adjust the starting position up and down based on conditions (wind, snow conditions, etc). They try to make sure that the jumpers are hitting the end of the ramp at roughly 60 mph.

One more shot looking up at the higher start positions.

Here is a shot of the two jumps from the bottom of the landing area. You can see that they have some white/slick material on the smaller jump, and some slick green mat on the smaller landing hill, which allows the jumpers to actually practice during the summer. Unfortunately, there was no one practicing today :(

After the jump complex, we headed over to the bobsled/luge complex. During the winter, you can actually ride a bobsled (with a professional driver and brakeman in control). During the summer months they replace the sleds runners with wheels so you can still take a ride. Unfortunately, they stopped the rides at 4:00 PM, and we arrived at the complex about 4:15 PM (bummer). So I was only able to get a photo of a portion of the run from the parking lot.

After the bobsled complex, we headed off to Lake George NY. We ended up riding about 162 miles, including the driving around Lake Placid, and the drive down to Lake George.

Tomorrow, we will drive around Lake George, and take a trip through the southern roads in the Adirondack Park.