Happy holidays and welcome back to another edition of State of the Mountain. Perhaps unintentionally, we’ve been posting these weekly since the start of the month, and my plan is to continue to do that until we run out of things to talk about. Plenty to talk about this go-around though, and I’m hopeful this helps answer some of the questions we’ve been seeing from you all. From a terrain perspective recently, we’ve been cooking, with nearly 100 percent of our trails now accessible either via lift or hiking access.
But before we get started just one note on that hiking access piece. If you’ve been frequenting Sugarbush over the last, say, decade plus, you’ll know that we always mark hiking access trails as being open. Some resorts do this, some don’t. Our policy has been to mark them as open regardless of how they’re accessed. This is simply a means of showing people that a trail is in fact open for skiing and riding. We’ve always done it for Castlerock terrain when it first opens for hiking as well as when a lift closes and we open terrain for hiking during the day. What has been more rare, though not unheard of, is when we do it for a pod of terrain like North Lynx. For those who feel this might be misleading I can understand that, but we want to be consistent across our trails. I encourage you to always check our Snow Report before hitting the hill to get a better understand of our terrain. We’ll always specify if something is hiking access only in the narrative, and our plan is to continue this moving forward.
Now back to your regularly scheduled programming. It’s been a banner string of days here lately for conditions, especially given the often volatile weather this time of year. Our 100+ trails have been surrounded by beautiful, albeit perhaps a little cold somedays, weather. On Wednesday we had an absolutely stunning inversion morning up at the summits. Yesterday and today have been full bluebird and inversions as well. It’s allowed for some excellent snowmaking temps and great packed powder conditions. We’re now looking at more temperate weather rolling in Sunday through Wednesday, which will pause snowmaking for a few days.
Snowmaking
Before that warmup, we have continued to maximize our snowmaking operations after the early season weather challenges. Recently we’ve been hammering a number of trails including Heaven’s Gate Traverse, Lower Snowball, Lower Organgrinder, Racer’s Edge, Spring Fling, Spring Road, Sugarbear Forest, and First Time. You’ll notice that while most of those trails are getting snowmaking for the first time this year, some we’re revisiting and fortifying in anticipation of the incoming warmup like Spring Fling and First Time. At Mt. Ellen we’re currently focused on Sugar Run and Riemergasse.
Once we get through the aforementioned warmup, we’ll be pivoting to new terrain including Birch Run and Sleeper at Lincoln Peak and FIS and Cliffs at Mt. Ellen. Further out, we plan to then focus on trails like Sunrise, Hotshot, Lower Northstar, and Brambles.
Lifts
For this section, our Lift Maintenance Manager, Spencer King, has taken the time to shed light on our lift operations. We are grateful for the abundance of information here!
To the Sugarbush Community,
There have been many questions and rumors circulating regarding the state of the lifts at Sugarbush. These have ranged from towers falling over on the new Heaven’s Gate to certain lifts not running at all this year. I would like to provide clarification regarding these rumors, as well as the rest of the lifts.
Heaven’s Gate – Opening day of a new lift typically brings challenges and small quirks to work through. Unfortunately, opening day on Heaven’s Gate brought a bigger challenge than expected. As people began loading, the tension system of the lift began to compensate and adjust. The pressure in the system climbed and went to overpressure, faulting the lift and shutting down. Typically, a tension system moves the drive carriage as the weight online changes to compensate, and will increase or decrease pressure as needed. In this case, a valve in the system was not adjusted quite right to handle the sudden increase in load. This valve is typically set during load test, but during a load test the loading of the chairs is a much slower process, allowing the lift more time to adjust. With the rapid increase in load, the system could not adjust fast enough and triggered a shutdown. Due to the very specific nature of the fault, it was difficult to clear it in order to clear the line. Once we had the line cleared, we immediately called Doppelmayr to come onsite and readjust the valve to the proper setting, which we were able to accomplish that day. Since then, the lift handles these dynamic changes much better.
There have also been some rumors surrounding the construction of this lift. No towers fell over and the concrete did not fail testing. The lift was delayed because weather impacted our ability to pour concrete. Low clouds delayed helicopter flying one day, and due to the vendor schedule they had to reschedule for later. The October snowstorm dropped a foot of snow the day before we were scheduled to pour the loading conveyor vault, further delaying that. Between these weather issues and some shipping delays, the little things added up and ended up pushing the project later than anticipated. It’s been great to have the lift spinning in time for the holidays.
GMX – The issues on GMX and running at a reduced speed stem from the cable position sensors on the towers. By code, to run at full speed a lift needs an electronic proximity sensor to monitor the rope position on the sheave wheels while also having a dedicated failsafe circuit separate from these sensors. The electronic sensors are constantly self-testing to ensure their viability, and will shutdown the lift with a tower fault if they do not pass their self test. Certain GMX towers have been failing their self tests at intermittent times, and we have been working with Leitner Poma to track down what is causing these failures. We have changed switches, checked wires, even had Poma adjust the programming of the lift to combat these issues with no success so far. With the switches being unreliable, we have been running at a reduced speed to meet code, and relying on the failsafe safety circuit to run the lift, essentially operating the same as a fixed grip. We are continuing to troubleshoot this issue to get GMX back to a reliable full speed.
North Ridge – North Ridge has not opened this year as we were finishing our annual maintenance and working to get it inspected. Due to a smaller maintenance staff as we continue to hire, work took longer to get it to our standards and ensure it was ready for public. We did inspect it this week and expect it to come online in the next few days.
North Lynx – North Lynx has not yet opened this year as we dealt with an issue during the inspection. We experienced a component failure on the auxiliary diesel that prevented the inspection from being completed. After ordering parts, we were in a holding pattern for them to show up and install before we could complete the inspection. Now that the component has been installed, the lift is fully operational and inspected. We will open the lift tomorrow and continue to operate the North Lynx pod on natural snowpack while it lasts.
Sunny Q – The Sunshine Quad has been delayed this year due to an electrical problem with the internal computer. We have been working with Doppelmayr and other vendors since summertime to get this lift running continuously. Our maintenance on the lift has been delayed due to this issue, including its scheduled dynamic load test that is required by code. We have at this point remedied the issue, and will now continue our maintenance and dynamic test, including linework, electrical linework, and our yearly lift inspection. We will continue to push the maintenance work along as fast as our staff can to inspect and open it for the terrain park being built in the coming weeks.
Slide Brook – Slide Brook often comes up as a lift that is notorious for not opening until later in the season. The reason being we have prioritized lifts that access skiable terrain. Our lift maintenance crew can only do so much at one time, and as we work through these other lifts we have decided Slide Brook will be the last to be inspected to make sure as much terrain is lift serviced as possible. We want GMX running at full speed and North Ridge open before focusing on the interconnect. Rest assured, it will open this year.
Please know the Sugarbush Lift Maintenance team is working as hard as we can to ensure the lifts are safe and reliable for everyone to enjoy. We want to see them running as much as you all. We appreciate your patience as we work to fix the lifts and look forward to a great season.
– Spencer King
Parks
The Sugarbush Parks team has done an incredible job building and maintaining the park at the base of Mt. Ellen, now with 25 features. They’re adding a few features to Sugarbear Forest at Lincoln Peak tonight as they await snowmaking to finish on Riemergasse and Sugar Run. Once that’s complete, they’ll begin the builds of the two larger parks.
Events and Descent
Finally, don’t forget about all the awesome events we still have between now and next Sunday. If you’re new to the mountain, we have a great advice blog for navigating the ins and outs of the mountain as well. And if you haven’t starting tracking your vert as part of our Descent To Rise Above Challenge yet, it’s never too late. We’re running the initiative all winter long!
Oh and one bonus note, we’re hoping to have the summit snow stake webcam reinstalled within the next day or two. It’s going back to the same location this year, and we’ll be looking to upgrade and potentially move our snow stakes for next season.
See you on the mountain.