joegm
New member
Tony Crocker":1eakvfbo said:I'm sure one of you easterners could make a more educated guess on the Hunter/Windham split, but I suspect Hunter does ~500,000, about the same as Mt. High. Big Bear's 2 mountains, under same ownership since 2002, do ~700,000 also, probably close to evenly split between the two.Hunter and Windham tallied 700,000 skier visits per year as compared to just 175,000 for Belleayre Mountain
I agree with this, though Snow Summit has some of the state-of-the-art "powdermaker" groomers that grind up the hard surface into a surrogate of packed powder. I may have mentioned skiing freshly tilled snow by one of these on the Lutsen trip. I think Big Bear/Mt. High have an easier time with the grooming than Hunter. A normal midwinter day at Big Bear is sunny with highs in the 40's, resulting in melt/freeze conditions, easier to loosen up the snow. At Hunter I presume it's below freezing and overcast most of the time, more difficult to mitigate the hard snow.Isn't that more tied to skier traffic? If you run a jillion people per day down a trail and groom it daily, it gets icy.
Perhaps joegm would like to render his expert opinion on whether these bumps at Lutsen were seeded:
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The snow was hard so I only skied the short pitch below me, but the bumps appear very symetrically spaced. Lutsen does ~100,000 skier visits. However, many Midwest ski areas make a strong effort to compensate for their terrain shortcomings. Racing and terrain parks are big, and it would not surprise me if they try to do something for the bumpers also.
my guess is those lines were not seeded.. but that is just a guess tony... the narrowness of the trail, the nice wind protection by the trees and the seemingly blue steepness of the trail makes me think that ....amazing what can be done with the right trail selection for bumps.. to bad places like Killington and loon can't figure that out.. if more places would pick better trails to let bumps up, you would hear me screaming less about seeding being necessary