Opening Day and What’s Next For Ops

Welcome to December. Since our last operations blog in early November, a lot sure has changed. Yet in some ways, perhaps too much has stayed the same. This November, and more largely this fall, has been anything but friendly to our mountain operations plan. For starters, the average temperature in the base area all of November hovered around 40 degrees. Typically, we are able to get a couple windows of good snowmaking prior to Opening Day, but we barely saw anything below freezing in the base area (and really we’re aiming for at least 25 degrees and below).

In total, we had just 9.6 hours of temps below 25 degrees for the entire month, happening on the mornings of November 14th and 15th.

We choose to open Gate House first in large part because the acreage and pitch of the terrain lets it open up without a ton of snowmaking hours, but Mother Nature didn’t even let us hit what has historically always been a very attainable goal. And due to lift construction and inspection schedules, we didn’t really have an opportunity to pivot to different terrain. If we had known the exact forecast for the month at the beginning, perhaps there would have been opportunity to adapt, but obviously that’s never the case.

The good news is that for the last several days we’ve been enjoying great snowmaking temps. The team has been working round the clock to get a product prepared that will be both enjoyable and safe. While we know many of you were disappointed with our need to delay opening, and believe me nobody is more disappointed than those of us who work here, we simply didn’t have the conditions needed to make good snow.

Our new Opening Day is tomorrow, December 4th, and we can’t wait to welcome you all back to the mountain.

As a special thank you for your support, the first 250 guests lined up at the Gate House Quad will receive a special Opening Day hat and a free breakfast sandwich. When the lift starts spinning, you’ll have access to Pushover, Lower Pushover, Slowpoke, Sugarbear Road, and a rare Opening Day Pushover Chute. Given the snow we’re seeing this afternoon and looking at storms through this week, we will also continue assessing potential rope drops on additional terrain.

With coverage on those trails now in good shape, we’re moving over to Valley House to focus on Snowball, Spring Fling, and the traverses. Temps look pretty good until Sunday with some potential snow later this week and then there’s a potential for another storm next week that’s teetering on the snow/rain line.

Which brings me to the next point: water.

As anyone living in the northeast knows, we’ve been suffering through a drought for the vast majority of summer and fall. That has continued into early winter. What it unfortunately means is that our snowmaking ponds, and the Mad River, are at a much lower level than is historically the case for this time of year. That has an effect on our snowmaking capabilities. While we will continue making snow as much as we can moving forward, we will need to do it at a lower capacity given our water limitations. While we never hope for rain, in this case it will at least be beneficial to recharging our water supply.

Moving Forward

After Valley House the plan is to move towards Heaven’s Gate terrain. We have already made a good amount of snow on Organgrinder and will be making snow on Jester and Ripcord once the lift project is completed. Our Acceptance Test for the new Heaven’s Gate Quad, which is when Doppelmayr hands us the keys, is scheduled for the end of the week. After that we take a couple of days to run tests and make sure everything is good to go before moving to pull out all construction equipment and get the lift inspected for opening. We still anticipate that to be mid-December. Opening Day is just hours away, and we all wish it could have been sooner. I think we can all be grateful to our operations team for working through incredibly difficult circumstances to get us to where we are now. When you see them out and about over the next few weeks, please show them some thanks. As always, you can catch the latest mountain updates on the Snow Report.

See you on the mountain.

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