Abasin opens for 2025-26 on Oct 26

EMSC

Well-known member
Yes it is true. you and thousands of your best buddies can all slam into each other on the single, much narrower than normal WROD that they will be opening. My personal assessment based on webcams is that this will be by far the thinnest and narrowest opening for Abasin since they installed snowmaking. It feels like a slightly desperate move to me by Alterra for the headlines. Why? because Keystone has made a LOT more snow a lot more frequently than ABasin this year and is probably also ready to announce an opening any day now. There is a reason ABasin put significant improvement in snowmaking into its recent master plan with the USFS. Especially the holding pond volume is just miniscule so that they end up not making snow a lot of nights.

Copper also looks ready to open for racers any day as well. I suspect they will during or just after the upcoming cold snap early next week. Loveland on the other hand is WAY behind everyone else. Don't expect to see them open for probably as much as two more weeks. By then even Eldora might get open (they've already run the guns and put a little bit down).

Question: does this really look like it will end up as an ~18" base from trail edge to trail edge to you? That has always been what all the early resorts in Colo advertised as being their minimum standards to open trails. eg manmade but good quality base depth and width. Looks to me like they are going the eastern US route with iffier and iffier efforts before calling it good enough to open. (for reference I historically see about twice as much snowmaking piles as I've seen this year on the webcams).
abasin oct25.jpg



On another interesting note, it looks like Copper will have a tiny bit of snow that makes it all the way from one season to the next:
CopperGlacier.jpeg

Those patches on the upper part of the Terrain park seem likely to not fully melt off even on the handful of remaining warm days over the next week or so. Although it has always baffled me that once the terrain park shuts down (usually sometime in late August) they go in with groomers and push all the snow around to as thin as they can get it to melt it off. Why they don't want to reduce snowmaking requirements for the next season by leaving as much as possible is beyond me. It would make for great frozen base piles for the enormous jumps. Literally no one would ever directly ski on it... makes no sense at all.
 
Question: does this really look like it will end up as an ~18" base from trail edge to trail edge to you? That has always been what all the early resorts in Colo advertised as being their minimum standards to open trails. eg manmade but good quality base depth and width. Looks to me like they are going the eastern US route with iffier and iffier efforts before calling it good enough to open. (for reference I historically see about twice as much snowmaking piles as I've seen this year on the webcams).

This looks like an East Coast opening that would make Killington or Sunday River proud. Often they would open quickly on 6-12" of machine-made on (a barely covered middle) Killington's Rime (previously Cascade) or Sunday River's T2, and try to build on it, or just let it wash away in the next October rain storm. The opening was to grab a headline and gin up skier interest.

I do not have much experience with Western US early-season snowmaking. It's too warm and wet on the Pacific Coast (especially the NW). I know Whistler would use snowmaking to open its upper elevations by Thanksgiving. And Mammoth has a sound snowmaking system, as does Heavenly, but I have never been to either resort during lean times.

Loveland seems to be losing its former status as the #1 early-season ski resort in Colorado. Not a priority anymore?
 
Keystone just decided to open this afternoon at 3 pm.
And that right there is the answer to why ABasin got desperate to announce. I knew Keystone was very close and with WAY more snow. I suspected something might be up once they disabled the Dercum Mtn cam sometime late yesterday. Of course it is still Keystone so the opening trail is quite flat but Kudo's to them.

Loveland seems to be losing its former status as the #1 early-season ski resort in Colorado. Not a priority anymore?
Loveland stopped really trying a decade or more ago. No material snowmaking improvements in a long time that I've seen (eg other systems are bypassing them for volume and efficiency now). I also think that they didn't make hardly any $$ from the public to open so early once ABasin and Keystone were also opening in the same time frame.

So about a decade ago Loveland decided to focus more of their efforts on race training lanes (Valley side) for the Euro's who are willing to pay big $$ early season. That decision further splits their snowmaking efforts for the public opening (Basin side).
 
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