Still that bad?

[BCBSNOBBSkier]

I reallllllly want to go to mountain creek, badly. I don't know why, it just seems like a really cool place to go. Has there been any improvement this season? Are the people still rude, and conditions terrible. Are the black diamonds really flat? Is it like camelback crowded or even worse? Thanks for any info. It just seems like the closest thing to a "real mountain" that we can get around hear. Thanks.

[rgrwilco]

i was just there monday. ill give you my take on the place. mind you i have been there each year for the past few.

 

south peak quad is the fastest ive been on. that being said, i also feel like mountain creek rides bigger than any mountain around here. the trails seem much longer and interesting. the flat people complain about is southern soujourn, which connects granite peak to south. i made it across no problem with an unwaxed board. alot of the trails, especially on south and bear, are open along the top of ridges so it gives it a bigger feeling looking out over the valley. the terrain on vernon sucks. boring, and a traverse that causes alot of collisions.

 

the diamond on granite seemed pretty steep from the lift. the park layouts dont have much flow and the jumps are wierd. very easy to overclear and trust me, it fucking hurts. for the amount of terrain dedicated to park to the amount of features on these parks, its lackluster. there are many trails that you can go for a very long time before you find any sort of feature.

 

and the snow. it was soft stuff on top of ice, to pure ice later in the night. the snowbase is miniscule compared to boulders. once the weather evens out im sure the snow will get better, as this was my only visit where ive disliked the conditions. they also had a jump on bear peak with an ungroomed landing. all death cookies. wasnt too happy about that one.

Edited February 15, 2009 by crapita

[method9455]

It rides bigger because the trails are spaced out a lot, but there really aren't that many trails if you count them. The downside of the spacing is that the snowmaking is less efficient, if you have to pump everything farther you have more leaks and more friction and more time spent fighting gravity. Combined with the more expensive NJ power and the warmer weather and the lower elevation, and big snow suckers like Sojourn and Horizon, MC overall has less snow per trail because it is too expensive to do it any other way. They do have a very efficient lift layout, you really only need 5 lifts to be open 100%, but in general I find the base to be thin.

 

You hit the nail on the head with the park, it is "large" in the sense that they have a lot on the map designated as park, but it isn't packed. Look at Sidwinder at Blue and how many features they have on 1 trail of equal length, and you go to Mountain Creek and instead of having 10x the features since they have 2 peaks of park, they have the same number.

 

The upside is I always felt MC had better progression than most places, if I wanted to teach someone, I would take them to MC.

 

I also think the place is pretty flat aside from just Sojourn, there really isn't that much hard terrain. Granite has some but South is broken up by that big flat section in the middle where the old peak was and the bottom of the sojourn lift is now, and Bear has a huge runout.