Today did not go quite how I thought it might, but it was still just as good. Looking at the grooming report, it seemed as if it might be a nice day to rip some corduroy off of Summit all morning before heading over to Sherwood. So I was a bit intrigued to see that Summit was on an operational delay. Seeing that the Subway lot was also closed today lead me to adding up the clues to new equipment being flown in to the top of the mountain.
Mountain managers also had their plans for the day altered. They had arranged for a Chinook helicopter to come in and fly in two generators, a fuel cell, some cabling and several pieces of K-rail to the top of the mountain. All of that was supposed to start at 4am and be done by the time the mountain opened. Instead, dense freezing fog kept the Truckee airport socked in until about 9am, requiring a big change of plans. Instead of taking direct flights over the ski area to the Summit area, the helicopter was forced to take a circuitous route around Paige Meadows and around Sherwood then back to Summit. You certainly couldn’t afford the possibility of accidentally dropping a 9000 lb generator onto an occupied ski slope!
Why was this necessary? Sometime late last fall, mountain managers discovered that an underground power cable that serves the top of the mountain had failed. It was too late in the year to dig it up and locate the problem. That cable provides power to the top of the ABC lift, the top of the Summit lift, cell towers for Verizon and AT&T and some National Weather Service sensors. All season, there’s been miss-mash scattered approach to getting power where it is needed, mostly with smaller propane powered generators. Verizon has it’s own dedicated generator up top, so their customers saw fewer interruptions to service. AT&T customers have seen little or no service this season. Needless to say, this has been a huge headache for everyone involved.
Setting up the two larger diesel powered generators up top should help keep things a bit more consistent until teams can get in to repair the power cable next summer. All in all, it took 11 flights to get everything that was needed up to the top. That’s on top of the three loads of propane we saw delivered to the top yesterday by snowcats, which the way I understand it, were headed to Verizon’s generator.
So instead I hot-lapped Roundhouse just about all morning, watching the airshow and waiting for the minute Summit would open, as the newly groomed Sunspot was whispering “Come ski me”. The groomed terrain was skiing great, although still a bit limited without Red Ridge and Ladies Slalom being groomed. Off piste, there is still a lot of variability. Some areas have been skied in pretty well and are growing moguls rapidly. I found Boomerang, Schusserang and Rolls N Knolls all to be very skiable today. All of those areas that skied so well off of Yellow the last few weeks are less consistent and need to consolidate or be skied in more. I never made it anywhere else today.
Midweek skier numbers seem to be up a bit relative to last week. The upper lots were just about full the last two days. It was tougher to judge today with some of the Subway lot closed for much of the morning. Between new snowfall, Lincoln’s birthday, Presidents’ Day weekend, miscellaneous ski & skate weeks and the World Cup thing, pretty much the rest of February is going to be fairly to extremely busy.
We saw crews digging out at the bottom of Alpine Bowl Chair (ABC) this morning. Don’t get your hopes up too high just yet. A trench was being dug just enough to allow the chair to operate so pre-season maintenance can be done. The specialty wiring harness/electronic control module from CAT is reportedly going to be arriving soon. It’s nice to see mountain ops teams prepping ahead of time. It’s been a long wait.
We are not done with winter yet. As of now, some snow Friday night into Saturday morning is expected, with most models calling for 3-4 inches. A similar system seems possible for Valentines day. Looking at the longer range, the GFS keeps the storm door open with new systems arriving every 3-4 days through the entire 16 day run.