New Years Eve Trip Report

[Schif]

I didn't have to go into work today so I moseyed up to the Mountain and arrived at 9:55am. I booted up for the second time of the year and went down to the lodge to pick up my pass because the server was down two days ago and they couldn't print out the card with the magnetic strip. Same issue today, so they just gave me a paper ticket and I was on the snow by 10:10. First run was a top to bottom. Since they for whatever reason never filled in the lazy river (It's still a blue snaking hole in the middle of the base area) The shuttle lift aka the one right in front of the lodge is closed. As a result you have to ride up the Iron Horse, then go down the first headwall of Spike, use the first cutover because the rest of spike is closed, this puts you 1/3 of the way down onto Mainline which was nicely groomed and was a nice cruiser, just before the bottom of mainline the runout portion of the trail was obviously closed lest you fall into a pool, so you are funneled to skiers right to the top of the bunny slope, which you can then ski down and either go back down Connection to the Iron Horse lift, or as I did, continue down to Cannonball on the Northface. Cannonball was in pretty great shape today, smooth snow, as opposed to almost 100% bumps that were there two days ago. The snow was nice groomed packed powder, a few spots where you heard yourself scrape, but nothing icy.

 

After Cannonball I went up the Phoebe Snow (Northface Lift) and hit Boomer which was groomed except for a narrow area of bumps on the skiers right. This was the trail of the day for me. Little traffic and very smooth with the occasional bump from someone who made a big turn, you could really grab some speed on this one today, which I did. I then cruised back and forth between Cannonball and Boomer for a while, mostly cruising runs because I had Jack Johnson in my headphones, but when "Danger Zone" by Kenny Loggins came on shuffle, it was an all out furious rush to the bottom.

 

I went up and checked out the park a few times too, but since it's only day 2 I only hit a few boxes and called it a day for that. The set up was as follows: 1: Wide box or wide rainbow box, 2: flat down rail or down rail 3: table top 4: table top 5: wide flat box or barrel bonk 5: box set on an up angle that launched you over a gap into a landing area. I didn't see anyone from park crew out and about, but there wasn't a terrible amount of traffic in the park and things were in nice shape.

 

As far as making snow, there were 8 fan guns going on Switch (the race course) 2 fan guns going on the base area, at least 6 if not more going on mainline, and it looked like they made a lot of snow on Smoke last night, as they were grooming it this morning.

[Schif]

Decent amount of people, probably less than 1/4 of the lot was filled, but they were parking cars a lot closer together than they ever did in the past. No real lift lines, but 90 percent of chairs went up filled.