Updated: 1-9-09 |
Hey Everyone. I'm looking forward to a great weekend here at Snowshoe. Winter weather has returned, and the mountain saw a foot of fresh powder fall between Wednesday and Friday. Friday was a picture perfect day-bluebird skies and powder stashes across the mountain. I'm getting ready to wrap things up on Friday afternoon, and I'm headed over to Silver Creek to experience these epic conditions for myself. It looks like we may see a little rain during the day tomorrow, but temps will drop in the late afternoon, and we may see snow Saturday night into Sunday. Either way, this fresh snow, along with all the snow we've made, will mean conditions will be very good-if not GREAT-throughout the week. As always, I urge those of you coming up to be sure to check out the Silver Creek area. Also, if you're in the Snowshoe area, check out the Northern Tract. These are mostly green trails, but there are some great cruisers over there, and they're some of our least utilized trails. Finally, we're reopening Camp 99 this weekend, so if you haven't checked out the new terrain we added last year, be sure to head over to Soaring Eagle Express and ride Sawmill and Camp 99. It looks VERY nice over there!
So, it's a new year, and we've hit mid-season, so it's time to address the typical questions/inquiries I get this time of year. As we all know, it has been an up-and-down winter thus far, but it seems like we might have turned a corner this week. Some of the weather experts I talked said the last few weeks of mild temps and rain are going to replace the January thaw we typically see. That means our future looks like several weeks of sustained cold temperatures, and a few good snowfalls as well. Heading into the Martin Luther King Holiday Week, it looks like conditions should be absolutely fantastic.
This is my second winter on the mountain and I continue to be amazed by how fast things can turn around. We saw some really slushy days at the end of December, but it's absolutely beautiful out on the slopes right now. Our snowmaking team is a really talented bunch, and our resort management team has made a commitment to investing in our snowmaking equipment over the last few years. All of those factors mean that as soon as the weather conditions cooperate, Snowshoe is making MASSIVE amounts of snow across our trail system. Because we don't see the snow totals that resorts out West do, we have some of the best snowmaking equipment in the industry. And when it's cold and dry, we make a very, very nice product with those guns.
I've been getting a lot of phone calls lately about when is this trail going to open, will we have Lower Shay's this year, etc. It's almost impossible to give an accurate answer to these types of questions, but I'll try to address the issue a little bit. Right now, and probably for the next few days, we're going to concentrate on making snow on open terrain. We want to make sure we have a great base across our ""bread-and-butter" terrain. That way, if we do see another thaw period, or some more rain, we won't have to worry about adverse conditions or losing terrain. But, if the weather patterns we're looking at right now stay the same, it looks like we'll have at least 2 weeks of nearly around the clock snowmaking. If that's the case, I can promise we'll move into new areas and try to get trails like J-Hook, Widowmaker and Upper Shay's open. Lower Shay's is a real project, but we're committed to making it happen this year, so with a little help from Mother Nature, I think we will get to 100% open by February. But I'm not making any promises, and this is going to depend on all of you doing your snow and cold weather dances!
