Demand > Capacity

Truth be told the skiing is really pretty good, if it were late November or early December. But here we are in the last few days of December, during one of the busiest parts of ski season. While there has been more lifts and terrain opened both at Alpine Meadows and Palisades, the demand for skiing and riding is far outstripping lift capacity. While it sounds great on the surface to have 7 lifts operating at Alpine Meadows, only three of them are doing the heavy lifting, handling a huge part of skiers and riders.

That means that over the last two days, we end up spending far more time waiting in lift lines than we do actually skiing down the mountain. Fortunately, since I am using the Slopes app for tracking this season, there’s some concrete numbers to look at for today:

During the day I completed just 8 runs before I felt like I had spent too much time standing in lines. That’s represented by the sleeping icon, where Slopes tracks that you are not moving downhill or uphill. Yes, lines are a necessity that we have to live with, especially during peak periods. One thing that seems to be compounding longer lift wait times is a renewed lack of transparency in lift wait times on the Ikon Pass app, which replaced the Palisades Tahoe app. Most of the open lifts rarely show a wait time. On the Alpine Meadows side, none of the lifts ever showed a wait time greater than 5 minutes today, when they showed a time at all.

It’s not ideal for a resort to open a month late and then have to immediately try to get to full speed during a peak holiday period. Resorts were caught just a bit off guard, with some of the necessary staff having taken vacation time for the holidays when opening seemed doubtful.

The Low Hanging Fruit

The official ops blog tentatively mentioned the possibility of adding Yellow or Kangaroo to the schedule sometime in the future. It would have been so helpful to have either or both of those lifts running the last two days. Yes, they are both slow old double chairs without a huge capacity, but they both serve a purpose. Yellow allows intermediate and above skiers a fun zone to play while staying away from the crowded base area lines. Kangaroo offers a place for teams to do organized practice and drills without being within the busy flow of the main groomed slopes. Sure, both of these zones could use a bit more snow. But with the smallest amount of work, they could definitely offer some solace when things are just nutty on the limited open terrain.

The Rest Of The Mountain?

There’s been no talk about the rest of the mountain and that’s worrisome. While coverage is not epic at this time, coverage is looking like it would not be out of the question to open Scott, Lakeview or Sherwood. The ops blog mentions thing like needing to wait for more natural snow or more snowmaking to get more terrain open and I am not sure that I buy that.

UPDATE: Tonights Ops Blog Update teases that Scott may be possible by Tuesday

Summit Did Open Today

The Summit lift did open today and a bit earlier than scheduled, just not quite early enough. As the day began, depending on which mountain host you asked, Summit was scheduled to open at 10am, 11am, 12pm or 12:30pm. The demand was certainly there. I snuck a quick photo of the Summit line, with a large lineup at 8:48 this morning. You can also see the new placement of the RFID gate, just before the pre-load board.

Ideally Summit should have opened this morning, while it was still a bluebird day. Here’s two shots showing Alpine Bowl. The first at 9:14 and the second at 10:48 after Summit opened.

Yes, an east wind brought in low clouds and fog that had previously been hanging over Lake Tahoe. That made visibility off of Summit pretty difficult at times. Sure there were times when the sun reigned again for a few minutes, but timing the long wait for Summit to arrive during a sunny patch was about impossible. I did push into the mosh pit that extended beyond the small corral at Summit and took a lap. Sunspot would have been far mor fun with visibility.

I heard a lot of talk this morning in the breezeway about people planning to hit Estelle, Bernies or High Traverse today with the Summit chair opening. Alas, none were open today. The exit out of Estelle and Bernies is a bit spicy in low tide conditions. High Traverse requires the Sherwood chair to be open. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

Hating On The New RFID Gates

All of the RFID gates have been replaced with a new model produced by Axess, which is somewhat the industry standard these days. It’s a big improvement in that the gate is just two small swing arms instead of the old turnstile type. Who hasn’t been trapped in the old ones with one leg on each side of the turnstile? The new gates should work well, as I have used them hundreds of times at Mount Rose, Mammoth and other mountains. Unfortunately that has not been the case over the last two days at Alpine Meadows.

There’s been a lot of instances where my pass was just not being scanned and opening the gate. Some overzealous pass checker then breaks into their recorded script: Do you have another ticket or an old pass in your pocket? Is your pass near a phone or an electronic device? Is your pass on the left side? Is there another metal object in your pockets? It’s not like I have not gone through an RFID gate like 30,000 times over the last decade. C’mon people!

I think I have figured out what’s going on though. I have always kept my pass in my left side pants pocket. I do that because I always wear the same ski pants, and I never forget to wear my ski pants. I don’t keep my pass is my jacket, as I typically rotate through a dozen different jackets, hoodies or flannels over a season depending on the weather. It’s easy to forget a pass at home. I don’t keep it on a lanyard because I remember the pre-RFID days where my pass was on a lanyard in my locker. The walk of shame going back to get my pass happened more frequently than I care to admit. Ski passes belong in pants pockets.

I’m going to say that the new Axess gates at Alpine Meadows are mounted too high. At Mount Rose and at Mammoth, the little swing gates are knee high, which means the RFID module is lower down too. Because the new gates are mounted on the old gantries, the swing arms are closer to the top of our hips. The RFID module is then too high to catch the pass lower down. Today I kept it in the lower left pocket of my jacket, due to no chest pocket. I still had to lift my jacket every time to get a gate to open. I can see I am not the only one having the problem. I watched a couple of poor coaches with small kids teams really struggle with this the last two days. Hopefully this is something that will get a fix.

Rain Or Snow?

Yes, there is some weather in the forecast window or in particular within this holiday week. Unfortunately it looks like we need to endure some rain before we see any snow. The models since my last report two days ago are getting into better agreement that there will be precipitation this week, there’s just less agreement on rain versus snow and when it will happen. Today’s thinking is rain to 8k or 9k for Wednesday and early Thursday before colder air moves in to produce snow.

I’m adding side by side GIF’s here for comparison. The left shows overall precipitation (including rain and snow) through the next 7 days. The right shows total snowfall for the same period.

You can see how the snowfall appears quite a bit later than the rain. Also not how this system is spreading up from the south as a cutoff low, which is not an ideal setup for winter weather. Hopefully that cold air tap works out. Two days ago it looked like just a couple of inches of snow. The GFS ensemble this afternoon was showing 8-12 inches by next Sunday. It’s not a game changer but it is something. It bears watching.

See you out there tomorrow. We will have a herd of family out there tomorrow, all of the ones that cancelled last week. We were wondering if the crowds today were just a weekend thing…until I wandered into downtown Truckee this afternoon. I have never seen it that crowded other than Truckee Thursdays or a parade day. I expect the week ahead will continue to be busy.