Sunday, December 10, 2017

Heading towards the Holidays at Okemo



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