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Went for a quick run before the freezing rain and caught a nice sunrise and the infamous morning mountain rainbow 🌈

Just wrapped up an eventful morning at blue the true mountain. Arrived to a nearly empty lot around 8. A variety of winter weather started while i was booting up. In the house was Matt Edge, TP4, and VTMark. First ride up the quad ended up spending some quality time (15-20 minutes) on a stopped lift. Some of which was spent in front of snow gun. Whole maintenance crew was at the top manually pushing the detached chairs around the top. Ski patrol had all trails leading to valley roped off stating that they were not running the quad or six and all traffic was being directed to doubles. So headed to lazy. Snow was fast and carvable. Rode double up next lap and rode lazy again. Next ride up the double made it nearly to the top before another considerable stoppage of the lift for 15-20 minutes. Heard at the top from lifty that someone fell off near the bottom. Rode lazy again and went out to the lot. Was all worth it for three great runs down lazy.

What a morning....one for the books and probably one that I wont forget... sitting on the edge of the grand canyon, by myself for most of it, watching the sun rise. Surreal

The smart ones would have taken the learning area magic carpets to get up to the Main Street lift.

We already hear you complain for weeks

before i jumped on here, i was just watching the valley cam, and thought, wow, its a ghost town. kept watching for a little, nobody coming down homestretch at all. saw 2 people skating away from the quad. i got up, checked the radar, it really looked like it was going to start bullshitting around 6:30 or so, so i packed my shit up and started home. then on the way home it looked like it was gonna hold off for a while, and i kinda thought i made the wrong call. not happy to hear both lifts are down, but feel better about not going at this point.

It snows again, but we’ve got to go… At least we aren’t driving 👍

I would imagine ice on the haul was making havoc when they went to detach. Fixed grip has their place because they almost always run.

Rode from 8-9:50, which included a 15+ min being stuck on the double. Luckily, didn’t get stuck on the quad before they closed it. Conditions were snow-ish. Sleet for a bit, then freezing rain, then rain. Roads were completely fine both ways.

above posted at about 10:40 am. Radar still from 10:50 am. WTF are they smoking telling people its starting to clear up? Thats some serious BM fuckery right there.

Was only about a 45 minute wait. Photo from earlier of some random dude. Can't want for the sunrise tomorrow

It will make skiing Lazy more fun if anything

They key difference between ikon and epiq is how they are run and the setup. Ikon is alot of Kls alterra which are running essentially the same old skiing model which is real estate. In that case if you devalue the skiing you devalue the real estate. Additionally much like blue or Killy or 10000 other places when they aquire they do so more surgically and retain far more of the in place workers. They are private and do not have to report numbers so quietly throwing money at people totally works. Epiq is public and has to report numbers so they are alot more hesitant to put money on the table to have the essentials run and the union thing makes them piss their pants. They are straight up Corp style, extract every last crumb of value by consistent aggressive cost cutting and bare bones running. Rumor is VR is building a response Ski Patrol to go to PCMR or Vail if something happens there LOL LOL

You can def meet a woman from Texas who can peg you on the hill

I wonder if smaller mountains will start going independent again. I know Eldora is a shit show this season already. They have such limited parking that on weekends the Boulder County Sheriff puts up a road block at the high school. They say if you don’t get there by 7:45, don’t come until after 1 pm. Today the update was that they opened up the road at 2 pm and we’re letting 10-20 cars at a time go, then waiting for more cars to leave the lot. it would be cool if places like Eldora, Monarch, Loveland and Abasin, Sunlight and Ski Cooper had a combined pass.

Wow

Super fun time today..Great weather.... good peeps....nice snow on Coming Soon and Lazy.... Main Street was OK..After riding I tried some more tele turns on the learning hill...Ended up riding the chair a couple of times too....Great parking lot scene today...

Wait what?? I forgot my pass last year and was told to just rescan the barcode/qr code in my email at the kiosk. I did and it just simply spit me out a new card.

Oh no how will I ever cope with this 😵‍💫

Little gap, widowmaker, crossover, falls and the chute for tomorrow.

Nice but I’ll believe it when I see it

Will be nice to be back out tomorrow AM with the boomers and get some more free falling in. Ski you in the AM

Absolutely, I'm dying to get out, Tuesday I think is the only morning I have work shit. Maybe it's a good thing and hopefully everyone gets it and shit can chill then for a hot minute.

You know Michael Jackson is from Gary Indiana...I’m all out of fun facts. Time to Beat It

And their "hitchhiking" was probably just getting a ride with somebody in the parking lot moving their car to the top lot.

Maybe you can borrow his sister?

I was considering an Epic pass this year but after seeing how these places look this season I am kind of glad that I didn't get one. I have no trips planned out west so at least I have the flexibility of going to a less crazy place when I do plan something. I did get the Indy Pass which is mostly smaller places. I'm hoping to use it firs the first time next week now that it has been cold and places are getting a lot more open here on the east coast. It makes me not want Blue to be on a pass because it would end up looking like some of these places. It would be great to have the option to check out other places on the same pass, but crowds like this would just frustrate me. I'm just rambling at this point, but anyway, hopefully you can get some more touring days to avoid some of that madness.

Not Epic, Ikon. Going to Sugarbush

Leaving people stranded at the valley is insane.

I think it's poor business practice to leave guests stranded at the bottom of the mountain after a lift breaks down. Honestly if that happened to be on a trip I would never return to that resort. To add, imagine someone getting hit by a car walking up the road because they literally have no other way to get to their vehicle. That could be a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Very nice pictures! I enjoyed biking around Grand Canyon Village on August 22, 2016. It would be fun to hike to the bottom but there's probably no WiFi.

On both alpinezone and Teton gravity somebody post a video of the Ski Beech chairlift shower and within five comments somebody said,”that person should be compensated with a hot chocolate voucher”

"every other ski area has the majority of their lifts running" i feel the guys frustration, but his isnt the only resort Vail is shafting.

Yea forgot to mention Main Street was completely closed for the race team, even after the quad was shut down

Enjoy your day in Arizona. Are you flying back tomorrow AM?

Yikes…sounds like an interesting morning 😂

@rummy how has Elk been? I haven’t seen any reports.

No Yocco’s? Everyone wins.

Lmao.

How awesome would it be if blue did the same thing for opening? Imagine PASR’s going full Usian Bolt from the pavement to the 6 pack

Today was amazing. It snowed last night, the forecast was iffy, so I checked webcams first thing in the morning and decided to go to, we’ll, First again. Second in line with only a girl with skis and a dog waiting ahead of us. It still snows a little, and the viz isn’t great, I can hardly see surrounding mountains, but it is what it is, and the gates open with two minute delay again… We’re riding up, getting past first station, and viz gets worse. Reaching second station, and it’s total milk. Fog is even inside the station. I pull the phone to check back on the cams, and yep it got worse on top as well, but at least I can see something on screen! At the final station it does look better, the problem is that the wind is howling, snow is blowing across, gaiter freezes solid, and we still can’t see anything for a safe run. Next chair lift to the very top is not running, so we’re taking the ridge walk again. Nothing to see out there, for there are clouds everywhere. By the time we’re back on snow I start feeling like those folks scaling up Eiger in North Face. But at least I have a way down. Chairs up aren’t spinning yet, and the attendant says that it’s gonna take at least another 30 mins, so we decide to ski down to the previous station. No viz, but the snow is awesome! It seems like there are 6” of fresh snow lying on groomed surface, so we’re just floating down while carefully watching the markers so that we don’t fall off the trail. The trail is also somehow shielded from the wind, so we don’t feel like frozen popsicles anymore. Got to the station, then up, then down again, it just felt sooo good… Some people started to form a line at the bottom of that delayed chair lift, we didn’t want to waste time waiting, so continued skiing and fantasizing about how great it must be up there… Finally the lift opened up, we hopped on it, reached the top, let the skis on the surface and immediately cursed. It was all frozen cord with snow just blowing across. In complete disbelief, half skiing, half scraping we proceeded down thinking “how can it be so shitty here when it’s so good only a little bit lower, snow has to change at some point”, but alas, before the thought even started to process, I suddenly hit an unseen pile of blown snow and flew head first. Soooooft!!! Later throughout the day we’ve found uniformly deep trails, icy spots and even some very decent groomers with at most an inch of new snow. The weather cleared up and went bad again. Viz fluctuated from “I can see everything around” to “I think there was a drop after this turn, where is it, a shit, here it goes!” It was a day of wildest skiing ever. From “I probably should just go back right away” to “Damn, is it time to get tested already??” And hardly any people, the locals are so spoiled!

@toast21602 you aren’t always first with the updates.

New trails for tomorrow:

Stowe = first week of Feb. Breck = first week of Mar. Idk when the Texans go on their spring break but hopefully they do when I'm at Breckenridge so I can meet a hot Texan woman like Peggy Hill

Big Boulder anyone?!

So today was the first time I’ve ever been to Bear for opening and they do it a little weird. They don’t allow anybody onto the snow till rope drop so the courtyard between the lodge and snow is PACKED. PHENOMENAL conditions this morning. Perfect sparkling cord that crunched beautifully under your board ripple by ripple, carve by carve as you plunged down Cascade with not a jerry in sight. The type of snow that would make a puppy pull a freight train. (this was my poor attempt to describe conditions like @Johnny Law) The snow held up great for the 2.5 hours we were there. Sub 3 minute lift lines for the first hour then gradually grew to 5-7 minutes. by 1030 lines were getting longer so my cousin and I went over to F lift and checked that side out for a couple runs. 22 degree but the sun was blasting so it was nice and comfortable…perfect weather. Just messing around, can’t wait to film some actual stuff in the coming weeks.

Trail called flat iron which has to be the steepest trail in bounds. Really fun

Today was good. The most PASRs for a weekend morning so far this year, I think. Skiing was great and a nice return to form for Blue. Cant wait for more terrain.