method9455

I'm not hating on you or Blue Mtn, I'm just sick of the "Jersey Sucks" meme, I get it at school all the time - mostly from people who don't have a clue about Jersey beyond the Turnpike and the Parkway. It takes me almost 40 minutes to get to either. I've been to Blue more than that, I went twice in 05/06 and 06/07, but I went more like 6 times each the last 2 years. The midweek deal is really good for college students and it is close from UD, and our ski club goes there. I like it a lot, and I think they could be making more $$$ by attracting more NJers, which maybe they could parlay into some better snow making equipment.

Check out the gallery of pictures on this link: http://www.wintersteiger.com/en/Sports/Machines/New-Machines/Edge-grinding/27-Trim-B Since it is all going over that roller, the overall shape of the ski/snowboard doesn't matter at all. In comparison doing it by hand is an chore and doesn't come out nearly as smooth.

I'm not sure that doing it yourself would be better. I don't know all the machines out there in the world but we had two different ones at our shop (one a stone, one a belt) and neither would mess up a reverse camber board. The tool is only working on a really small piece of the edge at a time - maybe like 1-2mm at a time - so it doesn't matter what the overall trend of the edge is. There is generally a big roller right at the contact point with the belt or stone and the angle of the roller to the belt/stone is what gives you the edge bevel. There might be other ways to do it but from my experience camber shouldn't matter at all.

The Catskills are not always the best option. None of them really have a good park. They have better terrain but I feel like only Hunter has decent snowmaking/grooming, and it can still get very icy. And the crowds get outrageous at Hunter on the weekends which is the only time I can go because the drive precludes going after school/work. I had a Belleayre season pass for 2 seasons and it was great for free riding but I stopped last year when it wasn't clear what was going to happen with the NY state budget cuts. I'm sure NJ people go to Blue, but I'm telling you as someone who lives in Jersey and worked in a ski shop for multiple years - most skiers and snowboards do not know Blue even EXISTS. They could be making a lot more money if they corrected that. The whole "the gapers only come from Jersey" thing is bullshit and you either know it and refuse to admit it or you are one of the people I have met at school that come from PA and reflexively think NJ sucks. I love the line about how NJ smells, when I've never walked outside of my house in NJ in my life and smelt something yet 1 in 5 days in DE I walk outside and it literally smells like shit from the mushroom farms in PA if the wind is blowing from the NW. Gapers come from all over but in my experience the highest concentration of them at a PA/NJ/NY mountain is at Blue - it is not even comparable when you ski a Saturday at Blue and a Saturday at Mountain Creek or Camelback. Who knows the reason it just is. I spend my winter hitting a lot of different places 2 or 3 times each. I spend a lot of those days buying lift tickets to mountains on Saturday and Sunday and skiing the whole day. You ski the same place over and over and over. And you have a season pass and from your daily TRs I know you leave early on the weekends (which I do when I have a season pass too for obvious reasons). But ski at 3pm at MC, Camelback, Blue and JFBB on a Saturday like I did last winter and compare. You will learn a lot about the mountains. M Mountain Creek has the worst lifts by far, you will spend your whole time waiting in lift lines. Camelback's layout doesn't hold up too well to a lot of traffic but there are hidden lifts and trails that stay solid all day. JF's east mountain can't handle that many people and gets scraped off but the rest of the mountain is solid all day. BB's park is not big enough for that many people but the snow holds up. Blue has a lot of gapers and they make the park completely un-useable and the snow gets really sandy. Going on a Wednesday from 1pm-4 is always going to be gaper free and good conditions. You compare Blue during the times you ski which is about as ideal as it gets to the other mountains on the few times you've been there at less than ideal times.

Dogs in snow are awesome. At first confused, but then so happy.

Oh, thanks that explains it. I don't do much down voting unless it actually deserves to be. Thanks Root, I really don't think Blue or even the people on internet forums realizes how few people in NJ know about the mountain. They could make some serious gains through marketing in NJ. Sadly I finally convinced some friends to start going despite the drive, and on our second day there we got yelled at by patrollers for going too fast on Paradise, so now they won't go back with me.

I might be missing the joke but its definitely unlimited. I don't think a lot of people are using the system right now but I am used to another forum where people really use it a LOT and it actually matters so I'm doing it on basically every thread I read.

Wow, got it today and watched it. I absolutely loved it. Prominent parts for both Blue and JFBB. I've seen shots of Mountain Creek in Danny Kass films in the past but a whole section in PA on trails I know was awesome. Well worth the money, even for snowboarders. I've seen a lot of ski movies at work but I've never owned one before, glad I bought this one. Overall the movie has great music and great shots. I like that they rep the places they go to instead of most movies barely mentioning it. I also like these borderline pro/am films because I feel like I can relate to what they are doing so much more than watching someone drop off a helicopter into the back country that I just will never get to or do some rail that will kill you if you fall off the side. And the movie exudes "fun" the way that Afterbang did. I'm not a fan of metal music as the background for a bunch of crash scenes of people getting hurt that make me feel sick after watching it (Mack Dawg's shakedown, some of the grenade films are almost anti-stoke). I feel like Afterbang changed that and made a lot of people go to lighter music and cut out the crashes or make them almost sarcastic like Absinthe does with their funny music, but somehow a lot of times the "fun" in these contemporary movies feels forced. Its like the director wanted to shoot a standard flick and then was like, hey, make it look like you're having fun out there! and you can totally tell. But this movie got me really stoked up for riding and you could tell the guys were into it. Great tricks all the way through. I don't know much about skiing park so I can't tell you what level it was at. I felt it was a good mix of park/urban/free riding. I hate urban skiing so I was glad that wasn't the primary thing. I like some of the shots on urban rails but when a skier gets on a rail, then in the middle of it does a 180 or worse 2 180s while still on it, I hate that. And they do that A LOT. I appreciate the technical difficulty but I'm not a fan the same way I'm not a fan of 270 on/270 off snowboarding shots. Other than that, I loved every shot in the movie. BUY IT.

I don't know, from my area at home no one goes to Blue. I never heard of Blue at all (Or Sno/Montage) before coming on PASR and I skied Camelback/Shawnee/JFBB for a dozen years before joining PASR. Seriously. Not even a mention. It feels weird to drive SOUTH to go skiing and it is really far. Not only my family/school was that way, when I worked at a ski shop and told people about Blue it was like 1 in 10 or worse that had ever heard of it. It was pretty much Mountain Creek or Camelback from our area and the debate was about that. Mountain Creek is 20-30 minutes away and Camelback is about an hour. JFBB is about an hour and 15 and Blue is about the same. Belleayre is really only about a half hour longer in each direction than Blue is from my house so at that point you start debating going to the Catskills over PA. And Blue doesn't advertise in New York. When you are coming out of NYC on Route 80 west there is a big Camelback billboard around Lodi, but there are absolutely no Blue ones. Camelback, Mountain Creek and Shawnee have radio ads on NYC stations but Blue doesn't. Camelback, Mountain Creek and Shawnee have TV ads and Blue doesn't. Camelback, Shawnee, JFBB, and Mountain Creek all discount lift tickets in the local shops but Blue doesn't. If it was not for PASR I would never have known or gone to Bluem at least until I went to college because our snowboarding club has lots of PA members and know about it. Now that I'm at University of Delaware though, Blue is the closest "big" mountain so I go a lot more often. I also like it because I've been to the other places so many more times. I've even gone from home a half dozen times just for a change of pace. I guess a lot of southern NJ people go to Blue but from Northeaster NJ definitely very few and that is where the bulk of the people in NJ live. And I really don't think anyone from PA goes to Mountain Creek. You don't see that many plates. Why would you? To get there you have to pass pretty much every Pocono mountain and you get less snow and warmer temperatures. Back when the park was so much better I guess people did but now the park is way worse than in PA and the management is a disaster. I drive twice as far and pay a lot more money in gas and season pass/lift tickets to go to PA over Mountain Creek, I really don't believe anyone is doing the opposite. I agree with you on the people at Mountain Creek being total assholes and it is the NJ/NYC crowd that does it just like at Hunter, but when I say "gaper" I mean basically people who dress like its the 80s or totally suck at skiing/riding and are trying to do stuff they obviously can't. Mountain Creek killed the gaper problem in the park through passes and the features being ridiculously large, with a long history of it being that. If you suck at park Mountain Creek was not the place to learn. I have a pile of pictures from 2002-2006 when I rode there a lot and Blue still hasn't caught up to that in terms of size & quality of the features, even JFBB and Bear really haven't. Of course Mountain Creek has regressed a lot since then. But back when they were prime and hosting the Grand Prix and the Jiblab was around with its original members the parks were sick and if you went in when you sucked people told you to get the f out of there, and when that didn't work they were the first around to bring in park passes. There was simply NOT a gaper problem AT ALL in the parks. Go out on Horizon and sure there are bus loads of 13 year olds falling over themselves, but in the park it wasn't an issue. Both Blue & JFBB still have a massive gaper in the park problem. In terms of apparel gapers, I don't care that much but thats what the Meathead film is getting at and it definitely happens more at Blue than at MC just based on the local client

Gotta agree with Poop on this one. I'd hit some slushy rail on a random Saturday in October for sure but Halloween is a great holiday to spend at a bar or a party, especially with real snowboarding starting 2-3 weeks later.

I down vote anyone every time they explicitly mention the rating.

You can probably get it at CVS too (well, CVS used to have a great magazine section, now not so much). Transworld Snowboarding is the most popular snowboarding magazine around (undeservedly, it totally sucks) and Transworld has good distribution among retailers because of their skateboarding and surfing products.

Hard for me to believe there are more gapers at Mountain Creek than there are at Blue, it is like stepping into a time warp when you get on the hill in Palmerton.

"Buy ONE Get ONE 10.23.09 | By ian Pick up the new issue of TransWorld Snowboarding to get a Buy one get one coupon for you and a buddy. Valid From Whenever our opening day is till December 23rd. You cant beat that with a stick, Issue cover after break." Sounds like a deal to me, especially since a lot of PASRs hit up JFBB early season and probably aren't reading the park page I figured I post it even though it is an advertisement. (And hey they pay for advertising space here right?)

Friday Nov 6th - Sunday Nov 8th look good there but a few cautions. 1) Forecasts 15 days out are a joke, especially on temperatures. That could easily go from low of 20 to low of 28 without significantly changing the forecast for anyone but those of us looking for a mountain to make snow. Computer models are just not that accurate. 2) Temperature is important but the 3 other factors that go into it are cloud cover, ground condition, and wind. Cloudy nights mean that the low won't come until very late and getting 2 hours of snowmaking weather a night is not worth the time or money. The ground is going to be warm if you just got off a warm spell, and before it is frozen/covered with snow it is tough to get stuff to stick. You make a lot more snow on the 2nd night of the cold snap than the 1st. And of course too much wind which often happens on the first night of a cold spell makes it even more inefficient, but they probably will make snow if they can either way. 3) Friday-Sunday is not a good time for it. If that cold spell was Tuesday-Thursday I'd say they would be more likely to do it so they could open friday/saturday/sunday, but opening monday/tuesday/wednesday isn't the same revenue generator. So I wouldn't be counting on skiing that Sunday, but maybe the next weekend or like I said originally, black Friday. Maybe I'm just mad because I'll be in washington DC nov 6/7/8 for interviews and wouldn't be able to make that but I doubt you'll see then open before the 2nd week of Nov with this forecast. And, if you don't get your hopes up you can't be disappointed. But I'd put money down that in less than 4 weeks I will have gotten on snow in PA.

Anyone seen the whole movie yet? I just put in an order for this film but it hasn't been delivered yet.

It reminds me entirely of when Mountain Creek put in their Sugar Park, it was by far the most used section of the park. There is just a massive demand for easy features and if there is a dedicated lift that people can lap the same 9 rails over and over it will be packed. So Bear Creek, Roundtop, Mountain Creek gave up on their pipes, and JFBB never had one, so this leaves Camelback as the only serious pipe around the area. (although what is Sno's plan for a pipe this winter?). The Catskills mountains have OK pipes but it seems like if you are south of Mount Snow/Stratton there won't be a nice super pipe for you on the east coast unless you travel to Vermont. This is a very sad development, riding the superpipe at Mountain Creek was my favorite thing to do for the 3-4 years they had it and I had a season pass there. I'm not even good at pipe and it was so much more fun than anything else. It just takes a different style of riding than most park riders have now. And Justo's right, QP's get beat up so bad, the only thing worse is a QP with a wallride on top because you get a nice under lip on the bottom of the wall that wrecks people. Absolutely no way to fix them without a cat either.

I think it is a great improvement, the little park at the bottom was often clogged up at the entrance with lots of beginners standing around waiting to drop since it was the only park that everything funneled into. I'm assuming the old area will still be park and the pipe will be as well?

This is a problem.

Yea, my pants are ruined from the sticker bushes but well worth it. Very stoked for this year at JFBB.

Go to the tape. Here is the jump line and the top jib area in January-2008.

Not to beat a dead horse, but it will be impossible to keep that trail maintained unless they have park passes. They did a decent job last year. I've seen far worse. I agree that Sidewinder was too windy like 2-3 years ago before they widened it, but now there are only really 2 sharp turns. The one at the end of the jump line that has the wall ride is too sharp and then you bang another right after it, kinda bad in my opinion. But I grew up at Mountain Creek when the park was on North and it was convoluted with multiple intersections and it had great flow, and even now on South it is has a lot of turns and intersections and its fine. Other than the wall ride corner they are all manageable.

Well then nothing you recommend applies to his situation. Sure getting from south east PA to EWR is a hassle. Getting from 20-30 minutes away from Newark to Newark is easy. I drop of my friends and family when they need a lift and vice versa. When the whole family goes we get a car service and its $30 each way. Even parking at Newark is a lot better today because of the parking garage, if you park there it is 150 feet to the baggage claim. EWR is not even especially crowded. Going from NJ to JFK or NJ to LGR is bad. It is a long trip and lots of delays. Newark doesn't have killer delays, especially with Continental because they have their won terminal. In my experience flying for ski trips the main problem is at the other end when a snow storm holds up the plane you are going to get on, or getting home. As for compared to driving to VT, I think flying to ski is way easier up until you get off the plane at the other end. Finding someone to drop me off at the airport, getting through security, getting on the plane. That is all really easy. At Newark the ski bag gets checked into special security at the door so you don't have to lug it around. Security is easy anyone who complains about it is not doing it right. Prepare your bag and yourself and it takes less than a minute. But the waiting at the other end for your bag, getting a car from the airport to the hotel can logistically be more challenging. So I'd say make it a 3 or 4 day weekend to be worth it. I wouldn't think flying out on Friday and flying home Sunday night would be worth it. Driving to VT can be just as bad though. I've had the drive to Mount Snow from probably the same area be 3.5 hours, and I've had it be 7 hours. My drive to Stowe was 7.5 and 9. It was worth it for a long stretch, but if flying at least you can sleep where as I had to pay attention the whole time driving back. And bottom line, skiing out west will always be better.

You're right, I just picked up the only Absinthe movie at the shop assuming it was this years. I never seen it before, but they probably had that song in the trailer. Looking at Absinthe's website the new flick is called "Neverland"? Check this east coast one out: Stowe Video High Anxiety Films

I picked up Absinthe's new flick Ready when I stopped by the local shop Friday. It was good, not as good as past years but I really enjoyed it. The first 3 out of 4 songs are bad, the sole exception being during Jeremy Jones part. But they used Major Tom by David Bowie which I swear was used in a previous Absinthe film with Jeremy Jones. It was definitely a Jones part so that made me kind of mad, get original. Then abruptly the movie switches to good music for the rest of it. I was ready to post "terrible music" but it really is just 3 bad songs and then 5 great ones. Almost no urban rails except for a lot of gnarly acid drops. I don't understand how Mikey's knees are still attached after some of them. A lot of free riding including airs off natural features instead of kickers which I like. In my opinion finding a giant snow field and building a giant kicker and hitting it is basically park with a powder landing. So seeing people hit wind lips and cliffs to me is back country riding and there is a lot of that. The Mt Baker part is freaking awesome. Nothing in it is earth shatteringly new but plenty of sick tree riding and I appreciate the more free-ride stuff than park. Speaking of park, I think there are maybe 60 seconds of park shots in it. Overall great if you are like me and like back country/free riding/free style but not so much urban rails or park.