Yes, three of us skied Pelkey. We picked up a couple fellows with snowboards on the way up, and they joined us for the trip.
It was my third trip through Pelkey. It's one of the best, and probably the most convenient backcountry ski trips in the High Peaks.
The first time I did it, I didn't know about the illegal ski trail, and just followed a bearing. Good trip. the other two times I've used the trail.
Last weekend the snow was excellent. There was a light crust about 4" down, but I had hauled my lift served gear (Scarpa T1, Rossi T4), so I could bash thropugh anything. Great skiing.
Here's the beta:
Best place to park is South Meadow, because Pelkey drains onto the truck road. I usually snowshoe, and carry my skis. You could ski or skin to the Phelps spur, but the time you'd save would be small.
At the summit of Phelps, you want to head East along the ridge, and then north into the basin. The first time we did that, it worked out pretty well. We found a good spot to start down, got some good skiing in, but then hit a band of thick spruce. After we fought through a couple hundred yards of that, we broke out into the open basin, and had a great ski.
Subsequently, a friend told me about the ski trail. The trail circumvents the spruce band. Here's the beta on that: Follow the marked hiking trail as it traverses along the summit lookouts. At a point near the end of the ledges, there's a decent sized flat area, and the trail turns into the woods. A few feet into the woods is where the ski trail starts. It's probably invisible in the summer, but it will be tracked in the winter. The trail had been packed out by snowshoes when we got there on Sunday.
The trail runs east along the north side of the ridge for a ways, with some up and down. Eventually, it turns left and down to the North (snowshoe tracks had gone straight ahead; I'm not sure where they were headed).
Once it starts down, the trail includes some fairly wild skiing, about single black, but narrow and treed. Trail deposits you in the open basin, kind of on skiers right. Then you go wherever you want. The basin is very easy skiing (not steep). Eventually the streambed leads you out on a long roller coaster exit on the L bank of the stream, and takes you back to the truck road.
(The trail is illegal, and controversial. If that's a problem, you can certainly eschew it, like we did the first time.)
The basin itself, once you get into it, is miraculously open. I'm not sure whether it was the result of a fire or something else, but it's amazing. In the winter, it's one of the most beautiful places I've seen. Great golden and silver birches, and little clusters of Christmas tree spruces, stand twenty or thirty feet apart in a trackless snowfield. It literally brings tears to your eyes.
