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Highway Star wrote:The people running Killington are on crack.
What about in 2006 when Killington didn't open until Thanksgiving Day, or 2009 when they were closed all of Thanksgiving weekend? What about the DEW TOUR held in January being a huge drain on resources? They will need to blow in excess of 100 acre feet of snow by Thanksgiving week to pull this off, which is something they can only do only 50% of the time.
POWDR is run by a bunch of morons.
Highway Star wrote:This is PURE INSANITY, what they are considering doing. It's either going to fail completely, or there's going to be extremely limited skiing for the public in November. The public / online backlash is going to cost them far more than any positive publicity they could possibly get out of it.daytripper wrote:Sounds great to me as I am never up thanksgiving weekend, but I can just imagine how crazy it will be on the limited terrain. Also They would have to blow a ton of snow on SS so that there is no chance it will melt out in a thaw, will that be taking away from other early season snowmaking? They like to blow the glacier when it is perfect snowmaking conditions and this would force them to blow it in less than stellar conditions making it much more expensive.
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Edit:
Well, put this to the BS test then....
Superstar is 3400ft long, and roughly 200ft wide, 300ft wide at the bottom. Lets call it 15 acres. They need to put down roughly 5 feet of snow to get the base depths required to groom the hill nice and flat.....trust me, race teams will not be happy if they keep shanking rocks. So that's 75 acre feet of snow. About what it would take to get the northridge triple open and a snowdon route open, with decent but marginal coverage, to the bottom of the K-1. They have to make all this snow by around Nov 20th, the weekend prior, so they can get the hill prepped and allow some training on it.
Now, without getting into the details of the low-e snowguns, which are FAR less effective than old style snowguns at marginal temps..........what has Killington's past performance been like? Well, some years they do great, and have the snowdon route plus many other trails open by thanksgiving, say 150 acre feet of snow (after melting) by Nov. 20th - this is the max. The average is probably somewhere around 100 acre-ft after melting by Nov 20th, enough to get open top to bottom on the K-1, plus a few more trails. In a poor year, they have just a few trails open off the northridge triple, or are closed entirely, with only 10-20 acre feet of snow on the ground.
Now what about this race? They are contractually commited to host it and if they can't pull it off, they stand to loose a pile of money. Hopefully they have insurance for this sort of thing. Lets compare senarios based on past winters - each of these happen about a third of the time:
Cold November: No problem, race happens, skiing for public likely on other trails off superstar chairs, plus K-1, NRT and Snowdon.
Average November: Race draws most snowmaking resouces for first half of November. Superstar might be open to public for first half of November. Snowmaking on K-1 / NRT starts once Superstar looks to be in good shape, public skiing only on NRT for Thanksgiving weekend (45 minute lift lines).
Warm, rainy November: Snowmaking focused entirely on Superstar, during small overnight windows of snowmaking, with several r*in events melting snow. No public skiing on Thanksgiving weekend.
So, by my estimates they have a 2/3rd's chance of having either NO public skiing, or skiing on the NRT only for Thanksgiving - both of those are pretty bad senarios.
This is not even taking into account the chances of an ice storm, major r*in storm, or 70F thaw the week of the event.
EPIC FAIL!