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After 3pm tickets are now $45 which is more reasonable, especially considering it is light until like 7:30 now. And you can probably avoid parking fee. Blue was charging $49 for only 4 hour after 3pm tickets Roundtop was charging $60 for night tickets this year which is insanity. Vail sucks

I didn't get there this year because every time we thought about going they were sold out! They must have had a pretty good year

I'm not convinced they couldn't make it to Sunday if they really had wanted to. The only trail which had truly massive bare spots was Sidewinder. Yes it is melting fast and 80 degrees, but many trails still seemed to have pretty good coverage. Understandable that they would not want to be open in the pouring rain with spotty coverage and few customers on Sunday though. Anyway, I am not a Blue regular, but that's the emptiest I have ever seen it. Overall icier than I would have hoped given 80 degree temperatures but I guess the rain did a number on the corn quality. Still a lot of good snow though, Widowmaker and tops of razors and paradise had the best conditions. Tried to do some moguls which was a terrible idea, rocks, dirt, bulletproof ice, snow melting out underneath the bumps and collapsing in. Impressive lake at the bottom of 6er lift.

Almost surely getting Epic next year, after some reflection, 2hr drive to poconos every single time not worth it when I can get a pass for Roundtop on epic 1hr away which also includes JF/BB Liberty/Whitetail and Hunter all as possible day trips. The question is now do I also get Indy. Probably will still hold on buying epic until Indy pass drops just in case they somehow add more PA mountains.

I was there - you might not have seen me tele turning on the runouts though. I am a n00b at that this year, this will be 4th time on tele skis. 2/5 platty, 3/5 shawnee, 3/12 spring, Blue seems so much bigger coming from Spring Mountain last time and actually having to take my time on tele skis rather than rip right down lol. The 1082' and express lift has got my legs on fire right now, I was cheating and parallel turning a good bit.

That is a fantastic picture

change of plans, I'm getting a late start and won't be skiing much more than 4 hours anyway so getting 4hr night pass at blue instead of camelback I'll be the dumbass telemarking in jeans if anyone is there and wants to try and spot me Pretty windy here in Lancaster, does Blue ever shut down anything for wind holds?

I am kind of in the same boat. Don't want to give money to Vail but with the prices and the fact that Roundtop is on epic makes it difficult. I am really trying to justify Indy for myself. Blue Knob on Indy is 1072 vert and considered best terrain in PA, if they have snow Shawnee would be interesting for the 2/3 times from Indy but I don't think I would want to ski there enough in a year to get a full season pass. I would surely use both day tickets there and then the 3rd day discount on a night ticket or something. Greek Peak has day trip potential but is pushing a long drive. Catamount pushing it even more. Lots of cool places in NE on there though.

Wow, was that one of the planes at the Reading air show? Looking forward to that event this year, hopefully it does not get cancelled again.

Yeah stats probability not the best way to consider the risk of riding camelback lifts currently but a good general idea of how risky it is to ride a random chairlift. I would be very interested in seeing the results of the investigation and am interested to see what they do with sullivan lift, if doppelmayer says any thing about it, or if Camelback is determined to be at fault for bad maintenance or the bouncing issue. But it does seem like this could very well be a fluke accident - lots of chairs bounce around quite a bit when they are stopped/started suddenly. Sullivan lift definitely very sketch since if it did it once it could do it again. It is just sitting there menacingly on the webcam. Stevenson quad also kind of sketch since it is apparently very similar, definitely will be thinking about this if I am riding it tomorrow, but from what people are saying stevenson never really bounced like people said Sullivan and been doing. At any rate, the risk driving in the car or of crashing/being hit by someone skiing is surely far more dangerous than riding the lifts at Camelback even now (really knocking on wood here as I write this).

Sweaty engineering time Ok so Camelback has been open since 1963 and, although a chair apparently fell off the bullwheel once, only 3 people have fallen off of a chair. Camelback does not share skier visit #s though so you can't get a percent there If we consider only Sullivan, it has been running since 1995 year round with 66 chairs and a 3.1min bottom to top time according to liftblog. Since 1995 66 chairs/6min round trip * more or less 5 full months worth of operating after considering both winter and occasional summer operation * 30 days/month * 12 hours/day * 60min/hour is 1,188,000 trips and only 1 chair has fallen off. This gives literally somewhere on the order of 1 in a million chance even on Sullivan. If there are about 2,500 ski lifts in the US, and at least as many no longer exist, and less than a dozen chairs or so have ever fallen off of a list in the US with people on them (mostly Yan detachables), this gives odds on the order of 1 in 500 million that a chair will fall off in any given trip or about 0.000000001% chance

Maybe I should bubble wrap myself before getting on the lift

Thinking I might go to Camelback tomorrow night given better base condition and, surprisingly, better night rate than Blue I will try my hardest to avoid the parking scam and to not let my chair fall off the cable

Ok so what I saw was only about buddy tickets I guess, now that I look into it again, it says passes purchased before 9/17 get buddy tickets But I didn't actually say any dates or anything about price increases so what I said before is kind of fake news. I guess it is possible that prices would go up that same day? but I have no clue

That would definitely make the situation interesting. The deadline for the low epic price isn't until late September so there is definitely time to see what is going on with these other passes.

I am waiting for Indy Pass info to drop this summer before buying any pass, although epic northeast $335 student price is very tempting with roundtop being the closest ski area to me at just under 1hr away. Might even do both (for less than the cost of Blue!). Issue is that epic areas will all likely continue to be zoos on weekends, and I also have a vendetta against Vail for taking over and screwing up good old Ski Roundtop. If by some miracle it turns out I can get more than 4-6 days trips out of Indy, without having to do insane day trip drives to the out-of-state places, that is what I will do. Currently only Shawnee, which largely lacks challenge, and Blue Knob, which usually lacks snow, are easily day trip-able for me. $199 was last year's price, which could likely go up, but, while inexpensive, would only be worth it if I used it up North a good bit. If any, and I really mean literally any (even Spring or Sawmill), of the other currently unaffiliated areas in PA get added to Indy that would make the decision easy for me to get it. Or Plattekill. Platty would definitely make it worth it.

A lot of people only ski 1-2 times per year/every few years, throw in a bunch of kids learning, and when you offer $35 ticket/rental/lesson its a good portion of the people there. Tried to go down to lower mountain on a rented snowboard there which was a bad idea lol that last drop is steeper than it looks and thanks for the welcome! I have been lurking here for a while, decided I should make an account.

There are two runs that are blue on upper half and black on lower half, and the final drop down they make by the long haul lift is a little bit steep for a blue run in PA. They shouldn't be encouraging PA intermediates to go to the lower mountain unless there is a way to grade a new trail down there. And yeah the $40 midweek ski for all/$35 college day tickets are fantastic, 9am-9pm ticket + rental + group lesson (pre 'rona) at one of the largest ski areas in the state. Used to be $25 before they upped it. Sadly that upward trend will likely continue. Montage seemed to be busier than expected this year which is good news for infrastructure improvements/its continued existence but bad news for mega cheap uncrowded big time PA skiing. College day vibe at Montage is definitely a time. Flyers jerseys jeans and beanies, parking lot full of beaters, heckling from the lifts, lots of spectacular wipeouts. good times.

If they could figure out how to cut a green or blue trail to the bottom I could see a high speed long haul be justified Maybe they can do something like the Greek Peak "express" where they have a loading carpet and crank up the speed of a fixed grip if they can't get the skier traffic down there to justify a proper detachable. But yeah for having 1000ft vert there it is pretty hard to lap all of it given how long flat and slow the long haul liftline is. I do hope that their cheap $35/$40 ski for all stays around for a while though, it is a great place to bring people who need rentals, but of course they will charge what the market says they can once they get a hotel in - not sure what the effect would be on skier traffic. It does seem like a fair number of people from further south take Montage/Elk overnights, I guess if Montage had a slopeside hotel they would get more of that vacation $$$ seeing as they seem to have a hard time attracting Philly/NY crowd

Well I guess the view could be good from there but as you said, pretty radical spot to cram a hotel/ski tunnel. Certainly would change the vibe of phoebe snow pod. Good for them though I guess, they definitely could use the skier traffic if this will generate some. More skier traffic=better lifts, better snowmaking, less probability of going bankrupt every few years

montage turning into dang camelback amusement park

Blue's Comet lift is pretty much the same age 1994 except Poma. Challenge is 2006 Poma and Tomahawk at Shawnee is 2010 Doppelmayer. I would expect Camelback to only run fixed grips for the rest of the season considering Stevenson is essentially the same lift one year older. FWIW Shawnee's high speed lift seems to be in much better condition (smoother, cleaner, faster, newer, and more reliable) than any of the others around here. I am wondering why Camelback runs this lift all summer rather than one of the parallel and easier to maintain fixed grips. Edit: oh hi btw long time lurker first time poster