EdBacon

Wildcat had a lot of pre-existing issues with their snowmaking system pre-Vail. This is hardly the first time they've struggled. However, Vail really doesn't seem to understand any of the east coast mountains they bought and have failed to make the necessary investments to get Wildcat back up to a state of good repair. At least management seems to be giving some more leeway to operations at JF this year. Challenge was allowed to go ungroomed to bump up which is nice. They have everything open except Floyd's which I expect to open any day now. Full opening by mid-January isn't bad and puts them about even with pre-Vail opening schedules. And that's with a reduced snowmaking regime and less snow guns. But then all of that is really just relearning what the old operations staff already knew. Vail came in, gutted the place, got years of complaints and now falling revenue and visitor counts, so they're kicking back some operations to the staff with any experience on local operations. It's like every dumbass corporate job you ever had where your MB business casual boss reinvents your job then gives up and eventually lets you do things the way you already knew they were supposed to be done. Like, it's a waste of time. Thanks for nothing, Vail. I hope their stock price is buried. They've ruined a bunch of good local ski hills. I would suggest the entire Poconos ski experience has been degraded by them. Multiple competitor hills have jumped on the suck bandwagon to try and squeeze blood from the stone that is Poconos skiing and now we've got multiple underinvested hills with aloof leadership looking at spreadsheets and planning their slide deck to talk MB buzzwords like an AI chatbot at their next business retreat in Palm Springs. What a load of crap. I hate Vail.

Grick Pick

I heard they're going to pump water over it from the indoor water parking lot. It's their new Ice Slide water park attraction parking lot. You have to pay to park though. Then pay to get in, then pay to use the slide then pay to let them let you leave the water park. Then you have to pay to let them let you out of the parking lot.

I once took a picture of the sign at the top of Cliffhamper that says "EXPERS ONLY" I sent it to my wife. She says you do not go down there it is dangerous but I am a really good snowboarder and I went down anyway.

What this thing? Is that harder than a double black diamond Cliffhanger I hear is teh steepest in the Eastest

Just drop the act and turn the whole mountain into water slides already. We know you want to, CBK. Ain't foolin nobody.

Hey wow would be a good time to use one of those fixed grip lifts they're letting rot. You know some people collect those things and some old mountains still keep them running and would love to have them. Or not. Whatever.

Do they still sell pierogi in the lodge?

I counted a total of 7 tripod guns on T-bolt. That was it. I didn't look over on the beginner side though, there might be more sitting over there.

I broke my little finger running into a French tourist at the bottom of the Nile Mile High ski trail at Camelback. I won't be back unless they make improvements.

BB still kept a larger number of the better guns relative to the amount of terrain they had to cover. Probably because of the park. JF only has the fan guns on a few trails. Challenge, the lower headwall of Rivershot... there's some around the beginner area too.

It's not but its more open as a % than JF. The only portable guns left at JF are the little tripod mounted guns. Didn't see any of the portable fan guns. They are going VERY slowly with snowmaking. They had dragged the tripod guns over to T-bolt so I guess we can expect that sometime in early-mid January.

Huge whales on Rivershot. Looks like they want that open by New Years. Not sure how the next week of rain and warm temps is going to impact things though. JF is only about 50% open. Was just thinking about this today, but Vail has a serious handicap operating JF as the main hill in the snowmaking dept. The old management made the snowmaking investments at Big Boulder, not JF. Most trails at JF do not have permanent snowmaking systems installed and require dragging portable guns into place. But they don't have enough portable guns to cover the whole mountain at once, so that means making snow on one or two trails at a time, opening those, then moving to the next trail. But when the weather turns it means you either delay more trail openings and resurface already open terrain, or you let conditions deteriorate and push for trail count. BB didn't have a problem with this since they installed more snowmaking capacity to build the terrain parks 10-20 years ago. So either Vail spends to put in a modern snowmaking system at JF or they keep playing catch up while under-utilizing the snowmaking system at BB.

They diverted all the snowmaking water to the waterpark probably.

Paved parking lot?

Marc Antony has had the chairs removed for years. It doesn't run and would need a bunch of repairs at this point. Cleo probably never runs anymore. Bailey might still run every now and then since it has access to the main base area which Cleo doesn't. At some point they need a minimum of two new lifts: a replacement for the Stevenson and another high speed 6 or 4 where the Bailey is sited. Then they need to address all the mid-mountain lifts which are also in a bad state. Glen, Raceway and that lift over by Birches all need to be replaced sooner than later. They are vintage 70s machines and CBK isn't the type of people who care for classic machines which is ironic since they have so many of them.

CBK only has two lifts. They don't want their fixed grips anymore. Try running a place the size of CBK with two lifts this is what you get.

Round-the-clock snowmaking should start Thursday night.

The Arrow IIIs are almost the same units as the Silverliner IVs. Different pantograph. Different seating arrangement because the doors are different. Can't remember. Either the Arrow of the Silverliner has the provision for the center door and the other doesn't. Both manufactured by GE in the 1970s.

Was there on Saturday and no crowds. Snow quality was pretty good. Too bad they'll have to reset again with the rain.

Whoa. Dude.

I'm surprised there's not more people.

And the guns are back on. Looks like they just waited until after closing.

It's not as cold today with the front still coming through. I see a temp of 27F with 75% humidity which isn't a great wet bulb temp. Vail absolutely does NOT run mountains as local mountains. They run the whole thing as a system to certain mountains' detriment, JF included. Maybe that will slowly change as the JF managers get more familiar with the mountain and the locals, but I am not holding my breath. Although I will admit they have done slightly better year by year since 2020/2021.

They'll start with Tbolt to get A lift running.