January is coming to a close. I don’t think I want to see it go. Pending some potential afternoon snow today, we’re closing out the month with 72″ of snowfall. Six feet! And that’s without any real major storm, just frequent and consistent smaller events throughout the month. 72″ blows past our average January snowfall of 52″, marks the second snowiest January since the 2010/11 season, and third snowiest since 1996/97. We were also able to escape the month without any major thaws or rain events. We saw the Riemergasse and Sugar Run parks built, Castlerock open, and even raised about $30k for our friends at AALV. What a start to 2025.
Snowmaking
The awesome weather of course allowed our snowmaking team to practically run non-stop throughout the month. They’ve been busy building up depths on some final terrain including most recently Pushover and Slowpoke. Over the past week we also touched up trails like Stein’s, Spring Fling, Snowball, Spring Road, and Gondolier. All in all, we’ve already surpassed last year in terms of total gallons used in a faster period of time. Like I said, those cold January temps really helped. In total January saw 625 hours of snowmaking. That’s 84% of all of January.
You also might have seen our post a few days ago showing snow depths on Stein’s. It’s 13 feet deep in some spots (and that was before we added a little more snowmaking to it). We should be setup nicely to run deep into spring again, with our plan again to close the first weekend in May. Snowball and Spring Fling have mean depths of about 7 and 8 feet respectively, with some spots twice that deep. For all of you who took advantage of the $99 TBD Ticket flash sale this week, your bonus spring ticket should have plenty of days to choose from.
Lifts
The mountain is in great shape. The final piece of the puzzle is Slide Brook. Ops has already groomed out the roads and the chairs are now all on the lift. As a safety reminder, we must be able to evacuate the lift in order to operate it and for that we need to be able to access all points of the lift line with vehicles. It’s a 2 mile long lift, so it takes quite a bit of work getting those routes prepped. If we do have to ever do an evacuation on that lift, it would impact other mountain operations as we shift teams towards that effort, including shutting down other lifts in case of emergency. That’s also why we won’t run it below 5 degrees. All the wind and cold temperatures we saw throughout January likely would have closed that lift a number of days if it had been up and running.
A lot of the preventative maintenance is already completed including mechanical and electrical line work and rewiring tower leads. We’ve brought in Alpine Mechanical Services, as well as Alterra staff mentioned in previous blogs to support our team in getting this lift open, as well as help train and educate our team. We look forward to getting this lift open soon.
Another comment we’ve been hearing a lot lately is about the top ramp on the new Heaven’s Gate Quad. We experienced something similar when we first put in Valley House as well, which is the same type of lift. We’re placing cones on the top ramp where you should offload as that can help with where to stand up. As part of the project we opened up that summit terrain a bit to allow you to off load straight off the lift as well. We’ve also been spinning the lift at 450ft/per minute, slower than something like Castlerock, to help with guests offloading. Look for a blog and video next week focused on all things lift safety.
Team Member Highlight
In chatting with our VP of Mountain Operations, Patrick Konvicka, we wanted to take the opportunity to start highlighting some more of our team members and all the hard work they’ve been putting in this season. You’ve already heard from and about Spencer in lift maintenance, and this week we’d like to highlight Silas Pollard, our Vehicle Maintenance Manager.
Silas and his team oversee maintenance of all our vehicles, both on and off mountain. Right now that totals nearly 40 vehicles. From groomers and cabin cats to snowmobiles and buggies to trucks and excavators, there is a lot of mobile machinery to keep in running order at a resort like this. Silas has been with Sugarbush since 2017 and has deep knowledge of our vehicle fleets. The hard work of that team rewards us with freshly groomed trails, faster access and response times to things around the mountain, construction capabilities, and so much more.
Silas has experience in multiple Sugarbush departments, having previously worked in both snowmaking and lift maintenance. That knowledge has allowed him to help out in other ways too including helping with the APU on each lift, the snowmaking projects on Pushover and Mt. Ellen Summit area, and of course most recently Heaven’s Gate. He’s one of the many valued members of this team!
Parks and Ski School
In other news, the parks team continues to crush it, boasting the highest number of park features in the company, and at least one of the highest in the country. They’ll be working to get the park on Slow Poke built next week. Even if you’re not a much of a terrain park person, it’s worth a ride up Sunny Q just to check out the setup, something I’ve had the pleasure of doing a lot lately as my 4-year old graduates from the Welcome Mat and on to chairlifts. All the credit there goes to his ski school instructors.
Speaking of the Ski & Ride School, if you haven’t checked out their programming lately I’d highly recommend it. They’ve been focused on adding new products to their already robust lineup and they have so many great offerings right now. There are a number of superb women’s programs available, as well as a revamped First Timer To Life Timer Program for those just starting out. The passion and dedication these ski instructors put in is one to be celebrated. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing how they operate first hand with both my son in ski school and my 6-year old daughter in Mt. Ellen Blazers on Sundays. Last week she got to ride every lift at Mt. Ellen, a classic bucket list item for any kid at any mountain, and she couldn’t stop talking about it. I’ll always remember the first time I did that at my childhood home mountain of Bromley. We’re so glad we decided to sign her up.
Other Notes
Our Descent To Rise Above initiative has now hit over 200 million vertical feet. Keep tracking! It’s going to take all of us to hit our billion vert goal and raise the $50,000 for mental wellness. Plus, don’t forget you can win prizes for tracking and using #beoneofabillion on your social posts. We’re giving out swag every week, including a limited edition run of Descent To Rise Above hats.
In other news, we’ve made some nice improvements to the stairs in the Gate House Lodge over the last couple of days. The events crew continues to offer a great mix of unique and recurring offerings and has a full slate of good times on deck for President’s Week. If you’re still working out your Pres Week plans, I’d recommend taking a look at our lodging special.
Conditions are just so good right now. Weather ahead looks variable, with more snow but also a potential warmup in our near future. Get here while the getting’s good. It’s worth it.
See you on the mountain.