Greetings,
New snow has covered the
ground and it's looking white around the resort. Winter is here.
As of the weekend of December
9th we have 36 trails which is almost 200 acres of skiable terrain.
Even though we have received the first snowfall of the season, snowmaking will continue at every opportunity while we have these colder temperatures. During the past week we added trails in
the Jackson Gore area, some in Solitude -- and most likely will be adding Rimrock
and trails around that area early this week. The plan will be to work on Upper & Lower
Chief, Sidewinder, Quantum Leap & expand teaching terrain in Jackson Gore
as well as beginner terrain in the Clocktower base area.
The other areas we will put
some of our snowmaking capacity on will be Wardance, Sachem, Ledgewood, Kettle
Brook and the Morning Star and Solitude lodging trails. The lodging trails are
important to Okemo and we should be opening some of these with the weather
expected this week. Wardance has been
tougher for us this year as the snowguns we have on the trail are the standard HKD variety and to use these guns the temperature requirement is below 20 degrees. This coming week looks like that will
happen. Without Wardance thus far, we have been holding race training on Sapphire. Okemo also hosted a
VARA slalom race on Nor’easter. We
understand this setup is not ideal and will work hard to get snow on the Wardance race
trail.
During the past week or so there
have been a couple days where the skiing conditions on some of the trails has
not been ideal. In fact it probably wasn’t
good at all! We realize this and are not
proud of the initial opening on some of these trails. We realize that some of the Jackson Gore trails
weren’t ideal when we opened on Friday. In order to help make the skiing and
riding better we are going to let trails “sit” for 24 hours after heavy
snowmaking. We will begin grooming after the 24 hours of “time out”. This allows the snow to settle, some of the
water to leach out and makes for a better surface. Rimrock will be an example of this. We will
finish snowmaking on the trail tonight and then won’t plan to open the trail until
Tuesday. We can’t do this every time,
but will whenever possible. Trails may
not open as quickly but the skiing, when they do open, will be better.
Our RFID ticketing system at
the lifts is working well. We appreciate your patience when it comes to working
through any challenges. Most of these are quickly fixed -- and much of the time
right at the lift with the gate monitors. If you are asked to go down to the
resort services desk that means that the problem is more than what can be done
on the phone.
Thanks for your support and
as always let us know how we can improve.
Bruce Schmidt
Okemo GM
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