machski wrote: ↑Oct 30th, '23, 07:53
skiadikt wrote: ↑Oct 29th, '23, 17:56
fwiw, with regards to opening, sunday river shouldn't be any competition this season as their plan is to open in jordan bowl on their spiffy new, heated seats, 8-person bubble. that's 1500 vertical feet at a relatively low base elevation. they're also saying multiple trail choices. though they say they've tripled their capacity in jordan, no way they can do that at that altitude given this weather window. but they will blow k away when they do open.
Its not just to use the fancy new 8 seater, its that they are still doing a lot of work in Barker basin and thus Locke's base on the fancy new Heated Barker 6. They have way upped the game on Snowmaking in Jordan, but with needing Lolla TTB to open there, I don't see them beating Killington. That said, the Jordan base is higher than Barker/Locke and often is several degrees cooler out there than even midstation level on Locke. Time will tell.
I spent a night at the Jordan Hotel in December 2020. I woke up to shovel over a foot of snow from my car, so excited for the day. It dropped about 4” of slush at the top of Spruce. Did nothing but r*in at the base of Barker. Wind holds shut down all but two lifts over there. Crowds were insane because they advertised the 12” of snow, in a spot where no one could get to. They’ve massively invested in snowmaking and lifts at Jordan side recently. It’s considerably higher elevation. In ME/NH, they don’t get the upslope snows that VT is blessed with. It’s all cement from nor’easters with marginal temperatures and snow levels. Jordan is the obvious location for early season operations now that they have the infra to support it. You see a couple hundred feet. They see an inch of r*in converting to a foot of snow. It’s like if Killington had a road and a parking lot at the base of the North Ridge lift.
There’s an episode of Storm Skiing podcast with the Sunday River GM, where they explain that they’re deliberately trying to move people to Jordan to ease the bottleneck at Barker. Jordan is also going to be the new center of the mountain when they’ve finished their expansion plans. So, even more reason to make Jordan the early season spot. Gets people used to going there first, instead of Barker. We’re all creatures of habit, after all.
The 8-packs are much ado about nothing, IMO. They have barely any more uphill capacity than 6-packs. What they gain in extra seats, they lose by spacing the chairs out more. This primarily serves to reduce the number of loading errors and stops by giving people a few more seconds to get in position. I think they’re extremely overengineered, but they also benefit from standardization. Boyne has several of the same lift now, imported from Europe.
