Snowbasin, UT 11/25/07 (incl. video)

[Admin]

Day 5: Hats off to Snowbasin's snowmakers

You've really got to hand it to them -- they covered a 2,800 vertical-foot run from the top of the Needles Gondola to the base that has to be nearly 2 miles long. They covered it wall-to-wall, and it skied awfully well considering that we didn't arrive until 1 pm and should've been heavily skied off by then. Aside from one steepish pitch near the top, it wasn't.

I had the occasion to stop to speak with a couple of the crew trailside and was happy to share my kudos for their efforts. I was also surprised to learn that they were using the fully-automated snowmaking system to intermittently "dust" different sections of the trail all day to keep surfaces fresh. I'm duly impressed.

Bob Dangerous and I racked up 15K vertical, and my thighs are feeling their first 3 days of lift-served this year. The long runs were thigh-burners, including the first one skied non-stop for the helmet cam:

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Snowbasin's snowmaking plant is impressive, and it really shined today as we still wait for winter to arrive in the Wasatch. A bus had transported an entire group staying at the Cliff Lodge at Snowbird, where they still wait for the season to start, and those folks seemed pretty pleased with Snowbasin under the circumstances.

 

[EMSC]

That's a lot of verts they've blown snow on for how warm it's been. But I still detest having to ski through snow making. For me personally, I'd actually take the trade off of surface conditions being worse.

Was it cold enough for them to blow snow at the base area or just the upper sections?

 

[Admin]

That's a lot of verts they've blown snow on for how warm it's been. But I still detest having to ski through snow making. For me personally, I'd actually take the trade off of surface conditions being worse.

Fortunately, all of the guns were running pretty dry -- an advantage of a fully automated system to adjust the mix, I suppose.

Was it cold enough for them to blow snow at the base area or just the upper sections?

Guns were going at various times top to bottom, and they're working on expanding terrain at the same time. It was about 40 at the base, 30 at the summit mid-afternoon, yet dry enough that evaporational cooling was doing its stuff even at the base.