Ski

From the PARA website: "Club Adopts a New Name Saturday, 25 November 2006 As a result of a recent acquisition, Montage Mountain is renamed as Sno Mountain. The name change also extends

It makes little or no difference to me, one way or another. The guy was either new, lying to you about who he was, or forgot everything he'd learned while creating a separate webpage about the race team seven months earlier. There's even another possible answer, but I'm sure Greg would prefer me not to include it.

"PASR is also a great place to hang out

And Lib is the only mod that could have set that lady's lock in the ticket line I almost forgot to mention the one out of control and very dangerous PASR member that was nearly removed from the mountain on Friday...the bottom of the run is fairly steep and there's not much runout room until you get to the lift line. Our PASR member was flying down the last steep headwall, blew right by the huge SLOW sign, then jammed his board sideways, completely covering a female ski instructor from head to boots with a ton of hard corn snow. She had to spit some snow out! The female instructor was incredulous that anyone would do such a thing to her and was about to chew his ass out, but our member shrugged his shoulders and pushed off to the lift line. The ski instructor had just experienced a close call with our Bringer of Death

The Farmers' Almanac is funny...they claim 80% accuracy, while their major storm predications are closer to 5% correct. The 50 and 100 year trends are used by meteorologists, as well as the FA. If you look at any 15 day forecast, day 10 through 15 are usually just the average temperature for those days, as well as what the normal precipitation for the particular season. I thought a quote from a Yahoo website that is a lot like Ask.com summed it up: "I once read a report on the accuracy of the farmer's almanac, written by a university student who majored in statistics and climatology. The conclusion was that the farmer's almanac is no more accurate than if you make your own guess."

I'm sure BC will be all over it and not just "making sure it doesn't happen again." It's pretty bad PR if someone buys a special pass to BC that offers discounts elsewhere that aren't honored.

I'd say Bear Creek owes you some cash, reynard.

Sounds like he was talking to a janitor at Shawnee instead of a marketing guy at Elk...but it made for a better story, or something. I guarantee everyone in marketing---and every other office at Elk---knows about it's race program. The marketing department just brought in the US Ski Team for a slush race---including an Olympic Gold Medalist---and they've held PA Cup Finals there since anyone can remember. The marketing department was totally in charge of the web pages for the US Ski Team race camp.

According to TVGuide.com, there's a women's World Cup slalom on Versus (formerly OLN) at 5pm. It could either be the race from two weeks ago in Finland, or same day coverage of today's race at Aspen.

Fom the 'Bush website: video Looks like Rim to Elbow...Elbow's a nicely pitched blue that they use for the ASRA race camp.

Ha, do you see dead people, too?

There's always divorce, 'Kitten.

Marco Buechel of Liechtenstein won today's World Cup downhill at Lake Louise, Canada. Defending overall downhill champ Michael Walchhofer finished 10th; The Hermmanator was 6th; and, Bode dragged his hungover ass across the finish in a pathetic 29th place, which was 4th among the Americans. Bode did manage to barely edge out 20 yr old Austrian newcomer Romed Baumann by .02 seconds. There didn't seem to be a whole lot of talk of Bode starting his own race series...

Oh, so are you suggesting Jeff didn't want to mess up his eye shadow? Is that what I'm hearing? I suppose we could let this just drop and never mention it again...that would be one way to deal with it...

Jeff's officially been called out by Nick. Definitely a Chinese downhill challenge.

Hahahahahahahaha! Hey, Old Geezer and Rob:

I feel like it's now officially ski season.

pics...

Rob, go visit the second shelf of your medicine cabinet.

Hey, Track, you have to forgive this weird euphoria that's set in among a lot of locals. We chose our vacation home because of the proximity to Sno, then ended up living here full-time when my 6 yr old was born. Ski areas aren't saved the way Montage was saved; they just die. I lived 10 minutes from Bell Mountain when it closed...and I still called Mount Tom home when it shut down. I drove over to Sno today in an effort to avoid my in-laws, but every gate was locked, including a 4-wheel-only back entrance down by Geisinger. The heavy fog had really set in around 1pm, which made it amazingly quiet. You could almost sense what almost happened to our home hill...by closing, it wouldn't have effected very many people, but it would have hit those few very hard. Instead, there is a new era...a time when the ski area will have it's greatest days ever. Jeez, it's almost a good thing that they aren't able to do everything at once; we are used to so little and have such low expectations, that a new lift, new guns, and new trails would have just been too much (eh, well, I'm totally exagerating, but you get the idea). And I'm definitely buying you a moose hat when they go on sale!

'Dude just called from Boston...he and 'Mom are headed to Belleayre tomorrow (Friday), if they are open. 'Dude and 'Mom will be in da house!

Ha, I'm with riderossi on this one... Track, I'm not trying to give you crap and I'm really not in the market for any new hats. You said the hats were way overpriced, so it just made me curious as to what kind of deal you can get for hats... So I went to Google and typed customized baseball caps, or something similar. Then, I clicked on the first few sites and hit the prompts as if I were a customer. And they consistantly told me I could buy some customized baseball caps for $20 to $35. I swear on Jeff's life that this is all true. Am I a wiseass for adding "Funny how facts sometimes get in the way of outrage, eh?" Yes. I admit it. But it's all about QUANTITY when you are buying customized hats and shirts. Apparently, Sno didn't want to sink a ton of money into buying a billion hats, so they likely paid near the maximum price. Someone in marketing took a shot at a number and probably had to keep within a budget of a few hundred dollars. Okemo, on the other hand, probably buys hundreds at a time and has had an existing account for years. Is this me just being supportive? I've been accused of much worse things. But I really did run through actual numbers. This isn't going to escalate into a war over a hat, is it? If so, then I'm totally and completely sorry and just maybe I'll buy you a hat (if and when the price comes down).

So after a little research at a few baseball cap customizers, here's the typical deal for a small company looking for a new logo cap (this is from a company called copycaps.com): "A good quality 100% cotton cap with 5 letters can cost as little as $17.00. That same cap with a lot of letters and graphics, sewn on the front as well as graphics or letters on the side or back can cost as much as $25-$35. The record for one baseball cap is US$96.00 (Click here to see Rob's own team logo that we custom digitized for him)...but on average our custom caps cost about $20-$25." So Sno Mountain probably ordered a few dozen and paid $20 for them and are looking at making 33% profit, minus the employee doing the work and any shipping charges (both for the caps being shipped to the mountain, as well for any caps shipped to individual buyers. Unless the 'employee' is a volunteer, it's not looking like a terrific money-maker for them. Funny how facts sometimes get in the way of outrage, eh?

Jeez, dude, the shipping is free. Those caps weigh a shi*load.

$30? Wow. I guess I meant shoplift a moose hat. BTW, the season pass discount is now "before 12/14" instead of "before 12/1".