EdBacon

Did you have to pay for parking?

I can't see KSL or Vail buying Elk. Just a vibe, but I just can't see it.

BB has a tubing park. Somebody said they used to have the whole mountain be a park before Vail. Wow that's a lot of tubing

I should try riding park tomorrow at Blue. Do they have a park open?

Back in 2012ish they had all their features and a bunch of sheds and fences tagged up by some graffiti artists from NYC. It was pretty cool for a minute there. Parks in general have seen a decline. They're expensive to maintain and build since they take up a lot of snowmaking resources, and the majority of guests won't care if it's there or not. It's a pretty small proportion of overall visitors to a ski area that are ever really using a terrain park. A few places like JFBB were the exception but even there Vail has decided it's not going to continue building terrain parks. Maybe that trend is reversing though.

I'm so stoked.

No.

What about all those many, many ski areas that don't have lights?

I'll start daily trip reports for tubing. Thank you.

I might switch from snowboarding to tubing.

I punched a French guy and broke my pinkie finger at Camelback. I think I told that story already.

Big money. No whammies.

Is that a euphemism for something?

what's a kunkle, anyway?

I wonder if it has to do with leadership at acquired mountains trying to put on a show for the bean counters. It's like they want to show they can run the hill on the cheap to maximize their margins to prove their worth and get some more leverage later when they need to make the case for investments into their mountain.

JFBB was the same way after they went onto Epic Pass. Lines were out of control and staffing seemed to be worse than under the Peak days. They would spin less lifts than the Peak days even with bigger crowds coming in.

Know how you can bring your own cup to Starbucks or whatever and they'll fill it up? Maybe they can do that with lifts. Bring your own chair and they'll hook it up for you and you can skip the lines.

Because everyone craps on Camelback already. When they pull this everyone expects it and shrugs their shoulders. People hold Blue to higher standards. Part of the paradox of low expectations, you start getting away with screwing up.

Looks like up north (VT, ADKs, NH, Maine) might see a net positive of base-builder from this. About the only silver lining.

Flood watches in effect.

I'm having a braunschweiger melt.

I skied Camelback as my local mountain for two years and I think I saw the triple running once, and the Marc Antony double running never in that time. That was like 7-8 years ago. Bailey at least gets used semi-regularly since it loads right by the main lodge, but they still use it frustratingly intermittently. Like I can't roll up on any given crowded weekend assuming it will be running. Sometimes it is, sometimes its not. The Glen lift area makes sense they'll open since it accesses the terrain park. You can't really use it for anything else though. Camelback has the bones of a decent ski area if they ever ran it right.

Camelback looks like it has this great lift infrastructure but the truth is they only really have two lifts. They hardly ever run their fixed-grips which should make for great congestion relievers, or backups. But they just hate turning the things on. My feeling was always that they wanted to get rid of them. It's like they hate those fixed-grip lifts.