Dance Floor Freed, Keyhole Does Not Move…And Other News

The annual Alpine Meadows Valley Homeowners Associations meeting was held Saturday morning at Alpine Meadows. Yes, that’s right, it is “Associations”. There are three different ones in the valley, as well as a number of different entities that are stakeholders in the valley. This requires an annual meeting to keep everyone on the same page. There was a lot of information to be shared. Several people contacted me to share tidbits.

Readers here are most likely interested in the report from Alpine Meadows management. Alpine Meadows VPO Scott Swietanski was on vacation. Brian McCartney from Squaw Valley made the presentation in his absence. The best we can tell, Brian is a “Mountain Operations Consultant”. Here’s reportedly what Brian announced:

• The movement to Free Dance Floor was successful and the Mile Long Terrain Park will not exist next season.

Instead, Alpine will continue to operate smaller pockets of park features where they have worked well in the past. We would assume this includes the mini-parks on Loop Road and Tiegel. It would be awesome to see a return of park features to Kangaroo Ridge and consideration of returning some showcase park features on Nick’s Run. There’s a rich history of successful freestyle athletes at Alpine Meadows. Why does Alpine Meadows continue to not recognize that David Wise and Brita Sigourney, both of whom got their start at Alpine, will be representing the USA at the Winter Olympics in 2014? Last year, Cody LaPlante and Amber Simonpietre, from Alpine Freestyle, were on the national podiums for grom freestylers. We sure hope that Alpine doesn’t give up on parks entirely!

• Keyhole will NOT be moved this season, nor is it likely in any future season.

• The second half of the snowmaking system was updated this summer to create a mostly new system on the front side. The two front side systems are now interlinked so one can feed the other in the event of an equipment failure. If BA’s earliest forecast proves to be true, this may have been a wise investment.

• The Hot Wheels Chair update is still on tap. The approvals and plans are in place, with a slight adjustment in the placement of the top station to enhance performance during windy conditions. SVSH estimates an outlay of 8 million dollars will be needed for the upgrade.

• There was also a report by Troy Caldwell on the Squaw-Alpine Interconnect and White Wolf. It sounds like the same that we reported last spring. There have been a number of educational junkets around the world to learn how big resorts handles their interconnects. There have also been a number of various studies done that size up the suitability of various land uses. Troy suggested he had seen at least 28 different plans. We hope that planning process takes forever.

• Brian also reported on base improvements at Alpine Meadows. The employees lockers were upgraded and that was as specific as it gets. The statement was made roughly to the effect of that no major upgrades are planned at the Alpine Meadows base until the interconnect project is complete. One would guess that there is still a lot of questions about whether or not  a village of sorts could be built on the White Wolf property, and whether that village will be owned by Troy Caldwell or KSL.

Finally, the last thing of interest to non-homeowners…Placer County made a presentation on the replacement of the bridge at the bottom of Alpine Meadows road. The bridge replacement has been pushed out another year. The current bridge barely works as a two lane bridge, and certainly fails at being a three lane bridge. It was also reported that CalTrans has set aside funding for a traffic signal at the intersection of Alpine Meadows Road and Highway 89. No details were immediately available about the timeline for that project.

Thanks to all that chose to share information from the meeting.

I’ll be honest here, none of this is “news.” I have not done any confirmation or fact-checking on any of these reports. I am not sure that I would call them rumors, as they came from sources I consider to be quite reliable. For now, call me a blogger. – Mark