method9455
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Posts posted by method9455
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Sunday January 31st I snowboarded with Glenn and Nick.
The ex-pats in the flesh
Glenn did this set of cliffs that were pretty sweet
These trees are the skiers right of trestle, a gnarly bump run with a double fall line. Most people who go down it are not looking for trees so these guys were totally untouched.
Cameras flatten out mountains, so you can tell there was some pitch on this one
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Whoops, I've been having fun the last few weeks catching up with people at UD and riding locally during the day I forgot about this thread. The lack of snow today needs to be replaced with some stoke.
First for segtahetta or anyone else interested, I got all the charges in so I have my expenditures. Mint.com makes life easy categorizing and tallying everything for me so here it is.
Except for food this is per person. The food is higher than exactly what I spent for myself because I didn't bother splitting out Danielle's food from mine. Whatever, most people would go out a little more often than we did. I also estimated airfare because we used miles.
Airfare: $350
Baggage: $150
Car service to/from airport: $120
Lodging: $450
Season pass: $369
Groceries: $520
Bars/Beer/Restaurants $220
Other lift tickets: $30
General Shopping: $50
Gear/Repairs/Tuning: $125
Total per person: $2384 i.e. $79 a skiing day for me there for a month.
I spent a little over $3k for Danielle and I to be out there, which is a pretty good deal for a two week vacation for two people. If I had left when she did I might have saved about $400 - primarily food and gear I broke. I don't think it would have saved me any on lodging and obviously not on season pass/transportation.
Good time to note our condo was the best of the 4 I've stayed in the last few years doing week to 10 day ski trips, and it was also the cheapest.
There is something to say for the big competition in Colorado. I looked into Utah and Jackson Hole and you can't even approach this price. Season passes double or more, lodging double or more, airfare was the same ($0 with miles) but thats about it.
Keys to it were buying the season pass fairly early and negotiating with people through vrbo.com for lodging. I got quotes from $1200 to $3000 for a 2BR condo in the same neighborhood for the month.
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Fun fact: if you go to the hospital after an accident they want your car insurance info not your medical insurance info. I had never thought about that so I went with Danielle to the hospital and left all the car insurance info in her car on the side of the highway. Luckily her parents knew this and brought the info later on but thought I'd pass that along because I had never heard of that before. Luckily the police report says it was no fault of her own so all the cost goes to the other persons insurance - car insurance in NJ is crazy expensive as it is so good hers isn't going up. She was on rt80 doing about 15mph and someone came down the on ramp at about 45 and didn't stop for the bumper to bumper traffic so whacked Danielle going at a good clip. Bumper/trunk/gas tank need to be replaced on Danielle's car and the other persons car was really messed up. But no broken bones or anything so it could have been worse, seat belt for the win.
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Kevin where are you skiing/riding tomorrow????
Nowhere unfortunately. Danielle was hit by someone while she was driving down rt80 and so we were at the hospital until pretty late last night. She's ok except for some bruises and whiplash but the whole thing was pretty tiring, especially since I got in late thursday and had already gone into new york city and back yesterday before it all happened.
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My dream is for Peak to buy Mountain Creek. Fan guns + good grooming - shitty village = awesome. And Intrawest already did the lifts which seems to be their thing.
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Good stuff.
Why is it that the first day snowboarder and the falling leaf always get blamed for ruining the snow, but the first day skier in the power pizza tuck don't get any crap? I'd say both are just as prevalent.
Because the snowboarder can move way more snow. The skier ends up pushing the snow to either side of them but at least it is still on the trail. The snowboarder literally pushes all the snow to the bottom. Even when you are riding well on steep terrain I notice more slough on my snowboard than on my skis. Its the nature of the beast.
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I'm home, unfortunately. I have the last few days of updates once I find the wire for my camera again. In a nutshell we skied Loveland, some more side country, a lot of bumps, and almost got killed. I also broke pretty much all of my snowboarding gear in the last 3 days. Got home in one piece, arrived to emails saying the start of the semester was delayed until Tuesday because winter session finals are canceled friday and saturday, meaning I have some extra time to recoup which is sweet.
I'll probably be at Blue on Thursday for my 30-somethingth day of skiing this year. I haven't really looked at the weather for the east coast in the last month, are we having a good year or a bad year in PA? It seems like it has snowed like crazy in DE this year but I didn't hear about much snow from my parents in NJ.
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Wow I am a hardcore local cause I boot up in my car...show up on time....and don't waste my $$$$ on shitty overpriced food....It's called being savvy...I get in 15 good runs before the goobs arrive. But the goobs are cool cause they give us hardcore locals people to laugh at. But hardcore and Blue in the same sentence...lol...well there is a cornice up on skytop....I'd hit it!!!!!
You are not savvy. You ski a lot. For example if you went sailing you would look like a total fucking noob. You wouldn't know the equivalent of booting up at the car, you wouldn't know what time of day to show up (hint, not the morning), you wouldn't know where to keep your stuff or how to do the sport. You'd be the total gaper that the locals laughed at. The only difference between you and the gapers is that you ski a lot and they don't. For a lot of people skiing is low on their list of activities and they only do it a few times a year. It is the top of your list so you know the details of how to do well.
It's not like you are smart and they are too dumb to figure this out. You know most of them see people booting up at the car and say, what a bunch of dumbasses getting dressed in the cold, I'll go inside where it is warm and pay the 75 cents to store my shoes. When you are paying a hundred bucks a day easily why not? For you skiing doesn't have a marginal cost, for them each day is hundreds of dollars so whats another 75 cents for a locker and 30 bucks for food?
Mountains make just as much off those people as they do from locals. Probably more. By the time you buy day tickets and rentals and lessons and food in the lodge, you can get up to the price of a season pass pretty quick. And there are a lot more of them than there are locals. So when someone starts complaining about things that bother the day trippers, thats legitimate criticism.
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R2's situtation is different, but yours is not. I've never used a locker. Whether I'm at Blue, CB, JFBB, Mount Snow, or Killington, I boot up at the car.
When I drive I boot up at the car. Even when I don't drive I usually boot up at home, I took the bus for a while too. But its different when you have a bunch of little kids. It's different when you don't own your gear and are renting at the mountain. It's different when you show up late and the car is really far away. It's different when your boots aren't comfortable but are shitty rentals. It's different when your jacket isn't good and you need a bunch of layers. It's different when you spend your whole time rolling in the snow on the bunny hill and need dry clothes throughout the day. It's different when you don't know what to wear because you don't have the experience to pick out the right clothes. And it's very different when you plan to spend a whole day there instead of a morning.
It is quite clear that a lot of you guys are completely oblivious to what the vast majority of people are like that ski. At lunch you can barely get a table, at some point in the day you can't get a locker. Why dont all these people boot up in the car and eat at the local restaurants? I think the people who boot up at the car and eat elsewhere are the odd ones out.
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Likely not, medium bindings barely fit 9s usually. Unfortunately large bindings are far more valuable than medium bindings for that reason so even the plan to buy the board and sell the bindings won't work. I'd look at the price thinking you are basically just buying the board for that price.
If you are buying a setup and you don't already have a board or bindings, I would honestly worry about getting the bindings first. You can always find decent boards for cheap at the end of hte season but bindings are hard to come by. And while you destroy boards bindings last a lot longer.
For finding gear, check out cleansnipe.com. Their selection changes every day but if you watch it long enough what you want will come up for sale. I was looking for a board and it popped up one day for $150 new, and normal price was about 500.
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I think R2 has a legit concern. Different things are important to different people. The ones hating are super local who do real short sessions. Life is a lot different when you are going for more than 2 hours at a time. Doug, Jeff, Toast, you represent one small segment of their market - the hardcore locals. The mountain is made up of a lot more people like R2. Sure at first chair people are booting up at their cars, but three hours later it is a very different story. And why do we go early? Because most people fall into that other group that shows up at 10, boots up in the lodge, buys day tickets, eats at the hill, might rent at the hill and might take lessons. It is a whole different world. If you are a season pass holder it makes a lot of sense to boot up at your car, ski for a few hours, and grab food on the way home. That doesn't work for most people.
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It would suck if Vail bought WP. Copper and Steamboat go with it so there would basically be one company that owned all of the mountains within 4 hours of Denver. Sure you could get 1 pass that covered them all, but I can guarantee they wouldn't cost less than $400 like they do now.
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Jeff you hand tune your edges? I agree with you on pretty much all the other tuning stuff you mentioned but I don't like the way hand tuned edges look vs machine polished. Maybe its my tool, you use this one? http://www.artechski.com/beastsideedgeproedgetuners.aspx
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I think there are a couple things to add.
1) Make sure you are getting a hand iron wax. Some shops do a machine wax where there is a big hot rotating wheel covered in wax and they just glide your ski over it. That doesn't open the pores in your ski so the wax doesn't get in there and doesn't last very long at all. Ask and make sure you are getting the hand iron wax. A machine wax is pointless.
2) You can get a wax, or you can get a stone grind and wax. The stone is going to give you structure which is a good thing, and also give you a fresh base to wax on. It is hard to offer a rule of thumb on this, but I try to stone grind as little as necessary. Over grinding your skis will thin the edges, reduce your base thickness (durability), and waste your money and time. You should absolutely do it at the start of each season to get rid of oxidation of the wax and get your edges cleaned up. If you keep up with your waxing from there you will probably be ok. I would stone grind it right now during your first wax for sure.
3) For frequency, I'd go 5-7 days on the snow between waxing and at least once a season. If you take a weeks vacation wax before and after. If you go one day a week, get it waxed once a month or every 6 weeks. You definitely don't need every day unless you are racing.
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Friday and Saturday had very similar weather, warm (35-40ish) and really sunny. If you took off your goggles you could barely keep your eyes open. It was basically spring.
I met up with Glenn and he showed me some new lines near the Sunnyside lift. There are some cliffs visible from the left side of the lift so we went to check them out, unfortunately they landings are not quite ready.
Looking from the top of a decent 15+' cliff while holding onto a tree.
A neat chute in the cliff, although I think it actually ended in a smaller cliff anyway.
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pictures or it didnt happen.
Nice.
Another solution is to get a backpack or small duffle and get one of those little airport locks to keep it locked shut, and bicycle lock it to a ski rack outside. Don't have to deal with a locker and you can open it as many times as you want.
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But the week prior JH had a deeper base depth then Alta or Snowbird
I just thought it was interesting. And, I'm pretty sure AltaBird average a healthy amount over 500"Alta does, though Snowbird gives different numbers in different places.
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Funny how Utah (esp LCC) is known for its massive amounts of snow...JH holdin down the fort
That's cherry picking data, prior to this last week it was a very different story.
As of 1/22/2010
Jackson Hole - 124" - 63% of normal
Snowbird - 153" - 74% of normal
As of today
Jackson Hole - 247"
Snowbird - 234"
We'll see by the end of the season. Jackson Hole averages 370", Snowbird averages 465". When they are even or JH is ahead it is a real bad year for Utah.
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I don't know why everyone is bitching about the line breaks in R2 posts. I'll take that over massive blocks of text any day. You are forgetting R2 probably has the text a lot larger than the rest of us so it might be the edge of his textbox.
As for the whole locker situation, that is a bitch. The Blue regulars here basically have 0 knowledge of what your typical day skier experiences. We don't drive up and stay for 2 hours worth of runs, so conditions after 10am matter a lot more to us. I do use my car as a locker and boot up there, but I remember doing ski club trips in HS and we couldn't use the bus that way so had to deal with all this BS. I also used to take the NJ transit bus to Mountain Creek before I was old enough to drive. You don't really want to sit on the bus wet on the way home or wearing your gear on the way up. I used to like to bring some food/water to throw in the locker for the ride home too, since you aren't getting the driver to pull in to the BMDI or McDonalds on the way home.
Stowe has the locker situation right - big roomie lockers that are free. You walk up in the morning and set your own PIN on a digital keypad for a locker and you can open and close it as many times as you want during the day.
These frustrations are not small, when it holds you up in the morning and you are missing the good runs before the crowds show up it changes your whole day.
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I love the trailers for "Frozen"
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The skier big air was unbelievable. Not only being able to pop those spins out but landing that clean is blowing my mind.
I spent last night ragging on Shaun White in a bar, but seriously taking a hit like that in stride is impressive.
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Decided to go to Steamboat on Thursday
A mesa we saw on the way up
There was lots of fun stuff to jump off of like this giant snow drift (i guess) and my first legit cliff, Glenn and crew were saying the cliff was 10' high, I figured more like 6-8'
Plenty of Aspen forests, even though Steamboat has significantly less snow right now than Winter Park the terrain is not as rocky and the trees have fewer bushes and stumps so it rides like there is a bigger base than WP. There are some cliffs and big smooth boulders but that is really it for rocks, where as WP has jagged stuff popping up everywhere.
In the afternoon it started snowing a bit, this is the top of the mountain
Overall I thought Steamboat had some really fun terrain. Lots of stuff to jump of off and slide on. I think Winter Park has more advanced terrain. Steamboat is also all below treeline. The glades are wide open and are cool with the aspens, but WP is more technical. There is nothing like the Cirque or the trees under the Challenger lift at Steamboat. Intermediate stuff seemed about the same. Maybe a little more vert for some lifts at Steamboat but the trail layout is weird and there are more non-high speed lifts than at WP. Even with less snow it seemed less tracked due to being significantly further from Denver than WP. It is about 2 hours further than WP so almost the same distance as Vail from Denver. The town was really sweet, I could actually see bringing non-skiers there. It was a blast and it helped to have a local showing us around that one of the guys in our crew knew so we made the most of our day up there, if I lived in Denver I would get the WP+Steamboat+Copper pass and take some weekends up there for sure.
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Glad to hear we are finally getting snow up there and that the 40 is getting to be good to go. I remember when Glenn took me in there. It was my first time riding out here and it reinstated my love of snowboarding. I was actually starting to get pretty apathetic about snowboarding after spending so many years on the east coast. Dropping that gate though was without a doubt a game changer and it made me look at riding so much differently. This picture is by no means a great shot of someone shredding or anything of that nature; it is one of my favorite pics I've ever taken though because it reminds me of when I pushed that thing open and was hooked:
Yea man it changed my world for sure. When you get up here Sunday we're dropping it again. Glenn showed me toufers and the lower mushroom patch today and it was damn fun too.
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I participated in that survey and in fact rated Blue's lifts a nine out of ten. That quad and six-pack are pretty hard to beat for PA.
How? They have two high speed lifts that access the same terrain and then the other side of the mountain has old as shit crappy doubles. At least Camelback has two high speed lifts that access different terrain (although they don't operate them well) and Mountain Creek has a pile of high speed lifts that is way more impressive than what Blue has.
A month in Winter Park
in General Chat
Posted
Dont have pictures from monday 2/1. These are tuesday 2/2. I snowboarded with Clay.
Did I mention there are a lot of bumps at Winter Park?
We dropped the 40 gate again, a little more side country can't hurt right? Clay having fun his first time through even though he has east coast carving skis without the right ski waist width for this snow depth.
Cliffs? Again?
My last turns in Winter Park - enjoyed the little mandatory huck at the top of this line.