DHarrisburg

No, I'm not a digger. Those guys don't really bust their ass that much anyway. I guess it's a little different when you have night riding.

What I'm saying is that I worked lifts for seven months and for the first month or so it didn't seem that bad. After you realize that you're getting paid peanuts to stand outside (rain or shine) and watch people have fun all day it really isn't as much fun as it once was. I just was curious to see if you were some new jack who is still giddy about getting a free pass and discounted food or if you actually enjoy working lifts.

Uhhhh, how long have you been working lifts for again?

I'm assuming you missed my Skullcandy headphone sale.

It is ridiculous that they have to fly a guy in to work on their park when there's already so much talent in the NEPA area.

or you could just link it so people could right click/save as

You are very bad at this.

OH MY GOD I JUST CAME IN MY PANTS

CB employees don't get much more loyal than you, do they?

How did Boulder have their first season as a terrain park-only resort finish as one of the best seasons? By hiring a firm to design and construct their park who can ride the things they build and has a strong idea of what other snowboarders want in a park. Boulder didn't order prefabricated and expensive rails out of a catalogue, they built them and showed the progress on their website. Boulder didn't spend an excessive amount of money on advertising, they let messageboards and word of mouth cover that part. Boulder didn't have to offer special deals or discounted lift tickets to have people come to their parks, the riders came and didn't feel bad about the prices because they understood that they would actually get what they were paying for, something that can't be said about the majority of east coast mountains. One other comment on the half-pipe issue; imagine if the only thing CB sold in their lodge to eat was meatloaf and it cost $10. Sure, a lot of people like meatloaf but it isn't exactly the ideal food that the traffic coming through a cafeteria would want to eat. Imagine if every time somebody complained to a employee about the choice of food the employee would tell them "Oh but the meatloaf is very good, the cooks work on perfecting it all day! We have a small group of employees who love the meatloaf and eat it every day because they like it so much. " Does this change the fact that you don't want to eat $10 meatloaf for lunch? No. If the cafeteria would simply divert their resources into cheeseburgers that cost $5 they would more than double their customer base and see a much higher satisfaction and returning customer rating than they did with the meatloaf but it might upset the small contingency of people who prefer meatloaf over a cheeseburger, we can't do that now, can we?

That's great that there's maybe twenty kids who ride pipe because it is the most "competitive" part of snowboarding. Let's compare the amount of money CB makes on the CMS school vs. the amount they would make with 200 more season passes sold and an influx of daily ticket buyers. Like I said I can't imagine any of my ideas would really go over too well with CB management but sometimes you need to make drastic changes if you really want things to change. CB easily has some of the worst terrain parks in NEPA (when compared to Blue, Bear Creek, and Big Boulder) and diverting thousands upon thousands of dollars towards features that nine out of ten people prefer would be a major change that would benefit the parks. USASA also holds slopestyle events. What better way to train CMS than to offer a decent slopestyle course? Why not offer slopestyle events (ones that are much more popular with the target audience, I might add) at CB? Also, as Method said, properly built rails will last a long time. If CB scrapped the halfpipe for one season and spent even half the saving on new rails they could start advertising it all over the place (saying you have $25,000 worth of new rails is one hell of an advertisement) and be able to keep those resources for at least five years. Once park riders start moving back to CB they could reimplement the pipe. One other question: how long is the CB pipe usually open for? I know out here most pipes don't open until the end of December into January, is it the same for CB? If so does that mean that CB is paying upwards of $10,000 a month to keep a feature that nobody rides? Does Boulder have a pipe? I think the new traffic that would come for the rails and jumps would far outweigh any traffic lost from not having a pipe. CB makes most of it's money from NY because it's the closest mountain, not because of it's terrain or it's halfpipe. Big Boulder's move to a dedicated park has reinforced one thing: word of mouth works. Boulder took terrain not much different from what CB has and turned it into one of the best parks in the entire East Coast. High Cascade is holding their TransAm at Boulder this year partly because employees who live in upstate New York suggested it after driving south to ride at Boulder (rather than drive to the closer Massachusetts/Vermont mountains). All CB needs to do is make a big push with the right people in place to completely turn around their reputation but that push requires money and radical change, both being things I find it hard for CB to actually commit. It's been shown time and time again that CB could care less about loyal customers and would rather make money off NY traffic because it's easy. What they don't realize is that the amount of effort it would take to turn their parks around is negligible when you compare it to the amount of money they would be poised to make.

The pipe seems to be a huge money pit for CB and honestly the funds that are wasted on pipes that a handful of people ride would be better allocated for new rails and cat driver training. I love riding pipe but I'd much rather go to a mountain that has excellent rails and jumps with no pipe than a mountain with a half-assed pipe, poorly designed and constructed rails, and 20 foot jumps with mediocre lips and landings. I'm not suggesting a complete removal of tranny, you could take the pipe cutter that CB already owns and still build quarterpipes with it. The steep part of rhodo would be used for a jump line. You could fit three decent sized jumps with dual-lips for different skilll levels and rope it off from the rest of the trail similar to what every major resort does when the park run is connected to a regular run (Mammoth's South Park is a perfect example of this).

I think I deleted the proposal I was working on but the biggies would be in-house rail fabrication, removal of the pipe and a reallocation of the funds (winch cat?), monthly focus groups with passholders, new park staff including a well-trained park-specific groomer, lengthen rhodo park to include part of the steep area down to the bottom of the run, sponsor support, increased budget (I don't know the actual numbers but I'd imagine part of the reasons why CB's parks suck so hard is due to being underfunded), more extensive event and contest schedule including weekly contests, and improved snowmaking capabilities in the parks.

Congratulations, you failed miserably, you're a shoe-in for the position.

I'll move back to PA and manage Camelback's park for 20k a season and a very generous budget to work with. I could turn CB around and make it the number one park destination in PA but the management there is so backwards that I think it'd be almost impossible to implement any of the changes I would want to make.

link to the teaser http://youtube.com/watch?v=z99Vtr9LFIY this is a no-click zone

I like how there's a no swearing rule and one of the member's favorite sayings is "oh shit." Also another member's fear is "bad shrooms." Alex please email me a draft sheet dharrisburg@gmail.com thanks can't wait to be in your clan.

Can your ride on a regular Saturday night if night riding was available? If not then this is fine, if you can ride Saturday night with a Sun-Fri + nights pass then you're right, this is a little weird. Shawnee's new marketing slogan should be "SHAWNEE: half the mountain, half the price!"

The only way this could get better would be if there were member fees.

I bet you rent.

I think he meant to link to .

Yeah I'll try to keep that in mind

Invite a complete stranger to a private rail session who may or may not be capable of sliding urban rails and no resources or means of making said rail work? BRILLIANT

Wow. Just... Wow.