powderfreak

That must have been the one that went through Killington. They shut down lift operations for a time due to some close lightning strikes this afternoon.

Useless cold.

What a miserable ski weekend, ha. Mid/upper 30s at the mtn with SE flow packing in the low clouds and mist. It looks like it should a full month from now. This is the absolute worst weather conditions this time of year. Raw, cold, damp but not cold enough to snow.

Back to back 60F+ at MVL and 50F at the picnic tables.

Mud season in full swing when temps reach the 60s in mid-March. The ground here is thawing very fast.

Today was HOT up here. 60F in the base area and low-50s at the summits. Snow is sticky on all but steep, man-made trails that are more granular. Avoid any intermediate or lower natural snow trails like the plague, feels like it wants to rip you out of your boots lol. The steeps are great though, I bet stuff like Ripcord, Organgrinder, and Steins will be fantastic. Spring skiing is also about the fun vibe regardless of snow conditions. Folks BBQing, sitting in the lot drinking beers, popup tents and stuff. I love the spring anything goes atmosphere.

Probably one of the earliest I've seen 1,500ft here get to this patchy cover point. South facing is just getting obliterated, north facing still solid cover but man the Spruce Peak south facing slopes are getting hammered. 2012 was similar melt out time at 1500ft during 5 days of 70s with lows like 40s and even 50s. Still really fun spring skiing with the stake at 54" on the north/east facing aspects.

Summit is at 51F! Mixing down to 64F at MVL. It’s hot.

Now this may be sacrilegious but if it's going to be warm I'd prefer for skiing reasons that it doesn't snow on the backside? Getting 2-4" snows that then warm up and turn sticky doesn't do a whole lot. I'd rather it rain, freeze, then warm up with sun... providing corn snow and smoother wet granular rather than wet powder/crystals. The skiing can be so good when granular (snow that's been through melt/freeze metamorphosis) pack warms up and becomes wet/glistening on the surface. This time of year you need a good 6"+ to make it worth the trade off IMO. Constant backend light snows of 1-4" in the spring can sometimes be worse for surface conditions.

It is. I put a fresh wax on but man you need some steep pitches to get going. Intermediate and lower cruisers are brutal. The steep manmade trails are a lot of fun though. It honestly needs to rain on it a bit as powder warning up just turns to glue.

it’s warm. 54/23 at MVL. Full spring skiing. It’s melting . Snow in town getting smoked.

Not to prolong the discussion but curiosity gets the best of me... is it the daylight change or is it the lack of sleep one night? Like how do you deal with time zone changes or say traveling to Europe or something? If you have something come up and get one less hour of sleep a night, does that linger for a month? Or is it purely that the body is fooled into thinking its a different time with the daylight? For folks who struggle with this I can't imagine jet lag or even changing a time zone.

Light white rain here at 750ft. Not going to be much QPF at all though here.

If it’s not broken, don’t try to fix it.

Gah no way … be like sleeping in Norway on a trip I took there in June years back. People BBQing at like midnight and get up to piss at 3-4am to full daylight. Weird way to live, ha.

I do like it this time of year. Goes with that spring vibe. Lots of late afternoon skiing and chilling up top before late ski back to the parking lot. In the end it’s still the same amount of daylight.

I mean you just pivot by an hour. If you used to wake up at 5am, now you get up at 6am. Society could adapt pretty easily as long as everything shifts.

No more 8am chairlift openings if it happens. Ski day probably would have to be 9-5 instead of the classic 8-4. I love the late light in summer… don’t really care in the winter, I’d keep it how it is.

One way or another it’s going to be dark… either morning commute or evening commute. I go to work in the dark and get home in the dark most of the winter, not sure it matters to me, ha.

@MRVexpatthat is the holy grail right there of a ski trip! Nice. I caught a 24” day at Alta with my father about 15 years ago while I was in college and it remains my best ski memory to date. The vibe of an Alta storm day and then the resultant bluebird powder day afterward is unbeatable.

Heavy heavy wax!

It does and it’s a mentally challenging thing for many including me. Did I like how it was when AIG sold $2000 passes and very expensive day tickets? Yes but everyone in town complained that they couldn’t afford to ski at their local ski area. Now it’s busy but so many new people to the sport and Stowe… like this week it must be a vacation week down south as the Florida, Georgia, Carolina crowd is here. And they are stoked. It’s hard to hate it when you see the kids from Florida just infatuated with snow… I get it kids! Ha. Now if I was getting on a plane to ski I’d go west but that’s another issue haha. The biggest issue is trying to balance people who wouldn’t ski otherwise with a decrease in experience for long time skiers. I don’t want to be selfish and think Mansfield is mine and exclusive to me… everyone should experience it. But there’s a trade off too. I also ran Stowe social media during AIG years and I know people forget how hated AIG was as well, ha. It wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns though most locals have convinced themselves it was. When the US Govt bailed out AIG in like 2008…. Yikes. I don’t think I’ll ever see hate directed towards a ski area like that again. The Vail stuff is peanuts to tax payers bailing out a company that owns a ski area on public land that charges the highest prices in the East lol. Arson and bomb threats, people defecating on the office steps. I still keep that stuff in perspective.

On another note, snow is sticky now. Hate when powder warms up the first few times. Needs to cycle to granular for corn but fresh storm snow getting mid March sun and 30-40F becomes glue.

MTN Leadership. The brand took a beating and they know they need to change it. The snowmaking issues were largely if not all staffing issues. I think most of the problems were staffing issues to be honest, we had them at Stowe too. The vaccine mandate didn’t help at all either. That more acutely hit Operations staff than any other department. Snowmaking just isn’t safe if you are running low team numbers out there… need full crews because if something goes sideways it happens fast. Need control room staff, staff on hill, etc. It’s very labor intensive and those needs just could not be met sometimes. It wouldn’t surprise me if they pivot off the super cheap pass a bit. I’m sure the volume over yield model may be shaken a bit but who knows. The labor force thing is mind blowing country wide right now. I know Vail was giving options of $3,000 bonuses and free housing if you would move from a ski area closed for the season in March to one’s operating till late April or May. For transient season labor that’s an appealing option.

I've heard grumblings that they want to pivot but being as large a ship as they are, it takes time. They got into it deep in most mountains this winter in the East. I still think the institutional knowledge retained at the non-Peak Resorts ski areas allowed for a better season (ala Stowe, Okemo, even Sunapee). Yesterday though was big news in the ski industry and the labor market is just getting weird. The VR company minimum wage is going to $20/hr ahead if next winter as the first pivot point. VR was first to announce $15/hr last winter and Alterra answered with the same... and locally I know Smuggs did match that in most jobs, but the independents won't be able to match $20 IMO. Businesses in town are going nuts right now too... going to need to keep pace with a very limited labor pool. When I started in the industry back in 2007, as weird as it is $20/hr was like pretty decent mid/upper management wage even (with OT and bonuses you'd get $50k to manage)... and starting was $7/hr. Wages stagnated and even two years ago an entry level liftie or parking attendant was doing $10/hr. Now it'll be $20/hr. Many of us keep reaping the benefits of the upward wage rise as they need to keep wage separation from higher levels and starting wages, so we all keep winning when starting wages go from $12 to $15 and then $20 in three winters. For the same job responsibilities somehow many are getting anywhere from 15-25% more at manager level and lower down its going to be near 40% more money in just two winters. From Stuart Winchester (great guy who writes well about the ski industry)... "It’s getting weird out there. My first inkling that ski season might go sideways was a series of cross-country autumn drives in pursuit of my secondary passion, college football. In the windows and scrub-grass highway partitions of every gas station and Burger King, the signs. Help wanted. $17 an hour. Sometimes more. Empty lobbies. Drive-thru only. Lines impossible, as though an asteroid were inbound and everyone was snagging a Burrito Supreme en route to their woodland bunkers. Caterwauling into the midst of this weirdest labor market in memory came Vail’s 99-cent Epic Pass, available next to gumball machines nationwide. Three years ago, this strategy may have driven season-pass prices nationwide into the basement, as flummoxed competitors tried to hold market share and appease hey-what-about-us passholders. But as we all know, three years ago may as well have been 50. Covid upended our world, and took the low-wage worker with it. Across Vail’s empire, from Stevens Pass to Park City to Paoli Peaks to Alpine Valley to Crotched to Attitash, not enough people showed up to blow snow, run the lifts, manage the parking lots, or groom the hillsides. “And we would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids-who-saw-the-opportunity-to-stand-in-the-cold-for-$11.25-an-hour-and-said-nah-I’ll-just-go-work-at-the-gas-station-for-like-double-that-Brah-but-thanks.” By the time Vail instituted a $2-an-hour bonus in mid-January, it was too late to save the season across Vail’s Midwestern portfolio, where most of its properties had slashed hours and operating days, or in New Hampshire, where traffic, mechanical, and staffing woes rumbled in like aftershocks all winter long. Vail’s mistake was not in discounting Epic Passes, which drove the little white cards into the bootbags of 20 percent of America’s skiers, but failing to meet the moment in the strangest labor market since World War II. Yesterday, Vail CEO Kirsten Lynch laid out an aggressive plan that reorients the company away from its McDonald’s-in-the-mountains reliance on low-wage labor and into a career-track organization invested in its employees’ welfare on and off the mountain. Here are the highlights: $20-an-hour minimum wage for all North American resort employees for the 2022-23 season, $21 for Patrol (including unionized Patrol), maintenance technicians, and certified commercial vehicle drivers A commitment to “aggressively pursue building new affordable housing on land we own” A career-track program that creates a Yellow Brick Road from, say, bumping chairs to management positions and more An enormous expansion of the human resources team to decrease reliance on Vail’s hated HR app A flexible work policy that allows corporate employees to live and work in any community where Vail Resorts operates This ambitious plan, launched alongside Vail’s second-quarter earnings release and (presumably) just ahead of its 2022-23 Epic Pass unveiling, lands in a complicated world, for Vail and lift-served skiing, yes, but also for America as a whole. Mountain-town housing is in air-raid-siren crisis. Inflation is rising. Skiing can’t decide if it wants to be the most or least exclusive sport in America. Covid is still circling. American workers are more assertive than they have been in decades. In the midst of these complications, Vail still posted positive business results yesterday: net income, skier visits, and total lift revenue all increased over the previous two seasons. Still, it was clear that Vail could not weather another season in which its narrative was overwhelmed by debacles like the meltdown at Stevens Pass. “We think a critical question is will Vail defend its moves and tweak its business model, or consider a more substantial pivot to balance pressures in its communities and protect the luxury experience?” Bank of America research analyst Shaun Kelley wrote last week. There are a lot of ways Vail could have pivoted: pull Epic Pass prices back skyward, tweak the pass suite to better manage skier traffic, better define mountain capacity, invest in labor, or some combination of the above. As usual, Vail dropped a plan that was more comprehensive and ambitious than most of us could have imagined. Initial reception has been strong. “…this [plan] sends a meaningful message that Vail is serious about improving its company and the on-mountain experience for its guests,” Kelley wrote this morning. The Epic Liftlines Instagram account, which had racked up 48,500 followers on themes of worker’s rights and overcrowding, announced that it was going into hibernation in a post captioned “WORKERS WIN!”