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).
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:
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.
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).
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:
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.
Outside of token season openers (Beaver Creek, Killington, Lake Louise), it's all Europe. However, alpine ski racing is now primarily a European Sport.