Calling for mid 50s and sunny weather and being such a huge fan of spring conditions. Decided to ditch work and head up for a day. Given I had a free pass to the place I figured I would hit Shawnee up again and give the mountain a 2nd chance. Rolled out of bed at 5:30, hit the Wawa up at 6:00. Set the ipod on shuffle and the cruise control on 80 and set in for a long ride. Hit the parking lot of Shawnee at about 9:30 with the temp in my truck reading 48. Slapped on the boots and decided just to rock a sweatshirt over a tee and my spring thermals. Got my ticket and was on the lift at about 9:50. Took a nice green run to scope the hill out, and get my legs. Was really shocked by the amount of base coming out of such a cold spell. It's apperant that Shawnee doesn't think the snowmaking to be a good investment. The widths and amount of bare spots was very disapointing. None the less, what they did have was in good shape. Center of the trails was nice and fast hero snow. Sides were surprisingly hard pack ungroomed ice. So after first run and getting my legs togther, decided to check out the beginer park for what I really came for. Now if I thought last year Shawnee's beginer park was a little off, boy was I mistaken as to how bad a park could be. It looked like it hadn't seen any attention in over a week. Lips in bad shape? There was no lips. What was intended to be ride on stuff was now, not even gap on, but ollie from flat ground. And what was suppost to be nice mellow stuff, now has 3 to 4 foot drop offs on the sides due to the massive holes that had been made and never fixed. On another note if anyone from there reads these forums. I appericate the thought of building new rails and what not for the park, but whoever thought it would be a good idea to replace the boxes and the rainbow with rails with a foot wide platform on the top must have been smoking crack. So anyway, after being bummed from a unusable beginer park, decided with there being no crowds to speak of, I would head over to their main park in hopes that their attention would have been focused there. I grabed the lift and rode up overtop their main park. I shook my head in disgust as I looked down at each feature and saw the same thing as I saw in the beginer park. Many nice new features that they built over the summer, just none of them maintained. I think in all the features they had the only thing anyone was using was a decent size jump with a attempt at a lip on it. I looked at my buddy who was with me and told him, I would be spending the rest of the day just doing some riding, and working on getting my switch dialed in. He agreed, and we spent untill about 1 just doing a bunch of cruising on good snow enjoying dodging all the sitting ducks. At about 1 the asian invasion was taking over the hill, so we decided to hit the road and avoid the evening rush hour. Stopped to some whole in the wall gas station, grabbed a vitamin water and hit the road and spent the ride home bashing them for such poor attempts at parks.
