Johnny Law

Yeah I'm pretty damn sure your talking about Extended Stay Midvale which is a fucking dump, place is full of meth heads and welfare moms. There is the Crystal Inn at 818 East Winchester St. in Midvale and the ski bus picks up at their front door. Also studio 6 in midvale has a UTA ski bus stop at $39-45/night, with a kitchen. La Quinta in Midvale is 55ish a night and it's a 5 minute walk from the 7200 park and ride to pick up the bus. Motel 6 and little america are on 600 south which is in SLC and as is maybe 2 or 3 blocks from the train which takes you to the bus depot in sandy to go up the canyon. Snowpine would let you do the entire trip without a car, its more loot but your in the canyon and don't need a rental car. I've heard the food is actually pretty good. Meals and loding is like 105 for a dorm. The days in located in Midvale used to run a $49 special that included unlimited public transport and lift ticket. I don't even know if they are still there but you could find out. I'd just stay somewhere cheap that is actually near stuff and just get up early and park your car in the lots at the bottom of the canyons if its 4x4 and chains. UTA is decent but the bus sucks for riding where you have all kinds of stuff and it can be painfully slow if you get the wrong driver. Check liftopia for cheap tickets of pick them up at Canyon Sports. The canyon resorts is offering some $100 2 tickets 2 beers 2 burgers thing too.

Dude I think the extended stay your talking about has a bus station that only runs twice a day and its like a mile from the bus stop. So even if you make the one bus in the morning you may not make the one back to that stop. Friday and Saturdays you get alot of people riding the buses back out the canyon so even though your done at 4 you may not be able to get on a bus until 5:30 and then you missed your one chance and have to walk 6 miles through beautiful sandy. Give me a few minutes and I'll check on the above.

Rebel hill is way better than the park, check it out...

I may have missed this but R2D2 why don't you drive ?

Didn't you just post on the previous page a story that said all was well in interwest land ?

The difference is between the GFS and NAM model, the NAM says warmer storm more qpf 30" in philly. GFS says get the fuck out of here all that baja energy is going in the ocean and therefore 6-12". Because of the way the fucking polar jets are setup VT and co will see fuck all from this which really sucks.

lulz...unless you are kicking it old old old school like with wood skis some of that isn't right. One UHMWPE (definitely screwed that acronym up) doesn't absorb water at all, the holes are too small. If your smart you can see where this is going, well then how the hell does the wax get in there. Nobody knows, Swix, all the crazy ski racing teams have looked at this in a highly scientific way and nobody can figure it out. Something is going on because the ski is definitely faster and you can see the extra weight if you weigh them but bottom line is nobody knows. There are two types of bases, extruded and sintered. Extruded are more durable and cheap so think rental fleet most decent skis are sintered. The difference is in the pore make up, extruded is 60% closed 40% porous, sintered is pretty much the opposite. The current thought is that wax somehow adheres to the porous cells and hence why you go faster. Floru layups outside of racing are retarded don't pay the extra loot for 20 seconds of use. High level racing like national team level stuff are excluded from the above those guys would put uranium in their bases if they went .00001 faster. For your average at home waxer base structure is probably more important than wax unless your AtomicJeff and know what your doing. Most shops have the machine set to crosshatch which in this area makes sense for the most part. However if you have a setup you only use out west or just generally like to get mach looney have them throw down a linear base structure, if your shop doesn't know what that is find a new shop. Finally there is some discussion in the scientific studies of waxing that have found that wax does exactly bull shit and structure and removal of ptex hair is what makes you go faster. Nobody knows for sure but it seems to work so I'll keep waxin.

Update: Panorama sold, squaw on the way, lots of talk about vail purchasing Winter Park which would probably suck. In Jackson, Wyo.,

That's very true, too many places fucked up and oriented everything in a way where you only get to ski half the hill. I don't want to have to ride 4 lifts to ride the whole hill.

In pa it really doesn't matter because we are all skiing the same hard pack but anywhere that actually gets snow the opposite is actually better. The snow simply sticks around longer because the double can't put as many people on the hill as a six pack. Old school hills with lots of slow chairs actually limit the total number of riders by default, MRG will never see the same numbers as the Bush because if they did nobody would ever get up the hill. People would say fuck MRG its too crowded and simply not come back. There are few hills that were the riding remains good even on a full capacity day. Vail may have the acerage, maybe Pow Mow but that place never sees a full house anyways.

Sounds like another good day. Stay with the big planks they make it much easier to ski thicker/mank/crud snow. Really anything under 95 isn't needed, if you can't carve a 95 ski you can't carve and the extra float and power will take some strain off the legs.

FKNA man! First real cliff, slackcountry, big pow days, good crew to ride with...I don't know your age or your responsibilities at home but you should stay out there. Incredible trip...really makes you think....

That is certainly possible but for the vast vast majority of lifts the lift itself has no idea where the chair is on the line. Instead some smart guy sat down and did a bunch of math that says if the haul line moves this fast and the detach/loading line runs at this speed how far do we need space the chairs so that we don't overload the detach line. What your talking about is kinda a smart lift where a computer would tell the chair when to depart the lift house, while I'm sure its possible it would probably be very expensive and suffer increased shut downs as all that equipment would be outside in some pretty poor weather. Bear Creek actually looked into putting a HSQ in and my recollection is they faced the same problem of not having a long enough haul line. If you pm BC-Mark I would bet he can give you some more information. In general I don't understand some skiers obsession with high speed lifts, I'll take 10 quality runs on a slow fixed grip double over 20 shitty runs of a six pack. I can think of very few mtns that have the acreage to handle that kind of uphill capacity even on the deepest pow days.

I don't do lift ops for a living so if I butchered this my fault but this is the way it was described to me by my cousin who ran a hill and a buddy who works for Mad River lifts, the company not the ski hill. Most lifts are respaced yearly look up at the haul line next time your on a lift and most of the time you'll see a little marker of spray paint. That mark is where that chair started at, there are a number of different factors but slowly over time even fixed grip chairs move their position on the haul line. Obviously you can't run a lift with all the chairs in a big mass unless the chair was designed to be run that way, so every once in a while you have to get out there and move the chairs into proper spacing. If the haul line is too short(I don't know what the exact figure is) on a detachable lift the chairs will start to bunch on the haul line because of the delay in the loading and unloading obviously this leads to the lift being unbalanced which is a big no no. The time the chair has to spend in the lift house is fixed because people can only load and unload at a certain speed, move too fast and your shutting the lift down all the time. Therefore you either run the haul line at reduced speed which kinda defeats the purpose of highspeed or you space the chairs so far apart that overall uphill capacity is actually lower than with the fixed grip. Gondolas bunch at the lift house because the time they need to spend there is substantial but the hangers on a gondy are pretty advanced as are the control systems and they are respaced every time they get back on the haul line. Snowbasin actually removes each gondy from the lift every night to store them in an underground facility, its been awhile but I believe k1 at Killy stores each carriage at the bottom as well. Clearly the same could be done for a quad or sixpack but you could just build 3 lifts for what that would cost. Most fixed grips actually have the ability to run as fast as highspeeds but because they don't detach at the lift house mad people would be crashing on the load so some resorts have installed conveyor systems. Alta's supreme has one and since the conveyor is doing all the work you can run the lift at a much higher speed. These systems are popular in Europe but expensive. I know there is a youtube video of the conveyor in action but it was named something weird and I can't find it. edit: apparently the put one in at snow

Nice man! 22 and Granite Chief are skiing royalty sounds like a great day. Squaw is a top five in terms of lift accessed gnar...

Just a note you can't run high speed chair with a haul line that short, every other day you would have to be spraying and re spacing the chairs. If you ever done a chair spacing you know a small lift can take a few days so I highly doubt Sno is ever picking up a high speed chair for a 500 vert lift.

Slackcountry nice! Movin on up to the east side to brand new apartment in the sky....was that the jeffersons or 227 ? Man days like that are the best, real game changers, you realize how far there is to travel and how much more there is out there to learn.

Don't worry Killy isn't making any money either so that village is pie in the sky stuff. I'm sure if they just build a 1,000 more condo units everything will work itself out and then they can run skyeship more than 2 days a week.

That's fucking cool of them, its good to hear there are still some good places left in the industry.

^^^ serious lulz 524 million short and they still bullshit like everything is ok....I hope fortress eats a bag of dicks. Hey guys everything is cool, remember our original loans we couldn't pay ? Yeah well we got some more loans and we kinda paid those, times are tough though and hey we were only 524 million short. Now if someone else will just loan us another billion dollars we should be cool until at least next month.

Pow Mow always delivers...looks like a perfect trip

Looks nice and sounds like your in line for some more snow. luls on Kirkweed, soon people are going to just start bringing their own generators

Vibes +++++ Contrary to what some other posters may believe there is no better car than a reliable beater. My pos has 145,000 miles on one clutch, has never let me sit and I never have to worry about making sure it looks nice. Here's hoping that next ride treats you just as well.

A+

Its not about being core its literally about the future of resort snow sports. Everything Stratton represents and embodies, nearly all of the major problems with Interwest and ski resorts in general relate back to the same bullshit. Build a huge fucking base village with lots of condos sell the crap out of them to people that can or cannot afford them, cash out and walk the fuck away. Who cares if its sustainable, who cares if the fucking place dies, who gives a shit if the other local places can't hack it, who cares if regular families are priced out lets build this shit sell it like crack and then cash the fuck out. Honest to god think in your head how many ski areas actually make a profit off of skiing and not real estate/"resort" bullshit. Very few and those tend to be the crown jewels of N/A skiing. So where does that leave the other 30% of the industry, the mom and pop places that want to run lifts and that's pretty much it. Out of business is where it leaves them and then all we end up with is endless fucking Stratton's. Endless fucking manufactured bullshit. I'm not saying there isn't a place for six pack lifts and base villages but there sure as shit better be a place for mountains were you actually ski and where the top priority isn't if Dan and Denise Buttfuckers from West Chester, NY can get a sweet 12 bedroom mtn condo they use once a fucking year. High speed lifts cost serious loot and the way lots of places paid for them was with condo sales, now lets say those condo sales dry up because the market bombs or you didn't do you homework and realize that no one wants to go to bumblefuck interior bc (revelstoke). Now you have lots of infrastructure you can't pay for with no real customer base except the hard core riders who were there before the condos and other bull shit. Look at all the places that are in trouble or actually went out of business (Tamarack should be a case study) they all played the real estate game hard and they all thought if you plopped a euro look alike base village down the money just rolled in. That's not the fucking way it works and if they don't figure it out soon its going to be a real shame because some great mountains will be lost to lift serviced traffic and we as riders, not the interwests of the world are the ones who will be worse off. Edit: Read this thread for more info - http://www.tetongravity.com/forums/showthread.php?t=179824