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Courtesy of Vail Resorts
Headline RSS FeedNearly 2 feet of new snow over the weekend at Vail, Beaver Creek
December 15, 2008 —
What a weekend in the Vail Valley. We went from a decent early-season snowpack that was a bit scratchy in places on Friday to full-on mid-winter conditions by Sunday.
The snow started sifting down lightly Friday evening, and by Saturday morning a respectable 6 inches had fallen. I managed to sample the product Saturday, immediately noticing a slightly crunchy and sun-baked base under that light and fluffy half a foot.
But that was just on Headwall in Sun Up Bowl. By the time my group got into newly opened Tea Cup Bowl, conditions were getting progressively softer. And Blue Sky Basin, which opened for the season on Saturday and faces mostly to the north, was spectacular.
Because it was unskied so far this season and protected in the trees on north-facing aspects, the snow was easily a foot deep in places -- light, dry and very manageable. But that was all Saturday during the day.
Overnight Saturday it dumped another foot at Vail and 14 inches at Beaver Creek. I couldn’t get out into it Sunday but imagine I’ll hear all about it from friends today and tomorrow. That’s OK, because by Tuesday another 15 to 22 inches is expected, and I won’t miss that mid-week treat if it materializes.
Another 4 inches fell Sunday morning for a total of 22 inches as of Friday evening, and so far this season Vail has had 93 inches of snow.
We could be on track for another epic season like 2007-08, the third snowiest in the history of Vail. The jet stream certainly seems to be set up for it thus far, with forecasters calling for another storm on Thursday and yet another one on Saturday.
Holiday skiers at this point are guaranteed very good conditions with most if not all of the mountain open, and if the storm cycle continues, it could be crazy good up there Christmas through New Year’s.
I rode the lift Saturday with a woman from England who said she and her family purchased Epic Passes because they planned to come out for a minimum of two weeks in December and again in the spring if possible. Season pass holders from England … incredible.
Just a couple of weeks ago when the snow started really falling (around Thanksgiving) for the first time this season, they started shopping for deals and found an affordable package with a direct flight to Denver on British Airways and lodging in West Vail.
Needless to say, with the snow what it was over the weekend, she was clearly quite pleased with her pass purchase decision. Right now, the Colorado Rockies have just about the snow conditions in the world, including continental Europe. Wise choice.
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Winning the Front Range riff-raffle: Vail cleans up on Epic Passes
December 11, 2008 —
The hue and cry over the unwashed rabble likely to snap up cheap ski passes and invade Vail this winter, clogging our roads and jamming our ski slopes and parking garages, has morphed into the “All the Love” ad campaign as quickly as you can say “economic downturn.”
And Vail Resorts, which bore the brunt of the controversy after the announcement of its unlimited, six-mountain, $579 Epic Pass last spring, revealed Tuesday it sold nearly 60,000 of the season passes, prompting accolades from some analysts who foresee a brutal year for the ski and tourism industries.
“Front Range riff-raff” comments from a former Vail business leader and concerns about parking on the part of some town officials seem like distance echoes from a different era – even though the debate occurred just seven short months ago.
And I have to admit, I was one of those saying perhaps it was time to drop the cheap passes and go back to the $1,500 rates we saw in the 80s and early 90s. People would pay a premium in order to enjoy close-in parking and uncrowded slopes, I reasoned. In retrospect, I could not have been more naïve. And anticipating the bursting bubble was a stroke of inside Wall Street genius.
In a conference call with investment analysts Tuesday, CEO Rob Katz said the company reaped about $32 million from the sale of just over 59,000 Epic Passes – good at Arapahoe Basin, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Heavenly (Calif.), Keystone and Vail ski areas.
Overall, Vail Resorts took in nearly $91 million from the sale of about 204,000 of all of its season pass products, including the discounted Colorado Pass. And there has been almost no discussion of parking problems, traffic woes or Front Range customers who tend to spend less than out-of-state destination visitors.
In fact, the town of Vail and the ski company partnered with the local lodging and retail sector to launch a $550,000 supplemental marketing campaign called “Vail All the Love” to target drive-market and Front Range guests with direct-mail pieces touting deep discounts on hotel rooms, meals and shopping. Still, despite better-than-average early-season snow, advance lodging reservations are off by about 23 percent, Katz said.
One silver lining? There may be a shortage of paying customers this season, but the recession is providing a much larger domestic labor pool. Concerns over the lack of H2B (skilled worker) visas used by many resorts to bring in foreign workers have evaporated, as suddenly Chicago, Kansas City and Dallas are as fertile of recruiting grounds as Sydney, Buenos Aires and Prague.
Someday maybe we’ll be able to have both: plenty of workers and plenty of customers. But don’t count on it. The only thing anyone can ever count on for a truly successful ski season is plenty of powder. So far, so good. Let's hope for more.
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Vail Resorts photo by Jack Affleck
Snow totals climbing, Vail's China Bowl opening, Telluride backcountry controversy, moose shooting
December 10, 2008 —
All right, seriously, I’ll stop with the predictions (and leave them to the Powder Predictor). I called for six inches of new snow overnight Monday into Tuesday and we wound up with a measly three. We being Vail. Beaver Creek did check in with a respectable five new.
But whatever you do, don’t look at the statewide Colorado Ski Country snow report on the left side of the page. There you’ll notice that Telluride tipped the yardstick at 14 inches new, Snowmass piled on with 17, and the state’s big winner was Silverton with 18 new and now a settled base of just under 50 inches. Whoa.
Speaking of big snow totals, Alyeska ski resort in Alaska recently passed the 200-inch mark on the young season. Granted, it’s a firm coastal snowpack no one will mistake for Colorado champagne, but two-hundy is two-hundy. And I just got a 50-percent-off offer from H20 Guide heli-skiing in Valdez. I don’t even know how they can afford to fly for that price, so give ’em a call if that’s ever been your dream. They’re wheeling and dealing in AK, and trust me, it's insane up there (see my story in Real Travel).
Meanwhile, here in the lower 48, the three new we got at Vail was enough to get a lot more terrain open in time for next weekend. China Bowl, celebrating its 20th anniversary, opens Thursday at 9 a.m., the Riva Bahn (Chair 6) out of Golden Peak opens Friday (finally), and by the weekend Vail will have more than 4,000 acres open and 25 lifts. By Saturday, look for parts of Tea Cup, Siberia Bowl and Blue Sky Basin to open, all in time for yet another storm later in the week (sorry, no predictions here).
As for Telluride getting pounded Monday, that will likely send the backcountry crowd into the super-sketchy Upper Bear Creek Basin, which was in the news in the T-Ride papers on Tuesday. The politics of powder could polarize the place if — as opponents suggest — the ski resort uses a proposed snow study to move forward with expansion plans in the slide-prone and deadly drainage off the ski area’s back side.
At a Monday meeting so big they had to use the firehouse, according to the Telluride Daily Planet, U.S. Forest Service officials agreed to delay a final decision on the snow study in order to take more comments on the topic and to give San Miguel county commissioners more time to mull it over.
County commissioner Art Goodtimes said he wanted more time to study the study, which would close the popular backcountry area to out-of-bounds skiers until 10 a.m. each day so ski patrollers could dig snow pits and throw bombs to trigger avalanches.
The Upper Bear Creek area has claimed several lives in deadly slides over the years, including as recently as 2002. Studying the avalanche patterns on the steep Forest Service land makes sense, some opponents said, but not if it’s the first step to putting a chairlift up the precipitous terrain.
“I’m having a difficult time understanding why you’re having such a quick comment period on this,” Goodtimes told Forest Service officials. “I think another couple of weeks wouldn’t hurt to think it over.”
In other high country news, there’s one less moose on the loose in Colorado’s high country after someone illegally blasted a Bullwinkle near Williams Fork Reservoir about 15 miles north of Silverthorne last weekend. Colorado Division of Wildlife officers are offering a $1,000 reward for information about the incident.
Many people are unaware that Colorado even has a moose population, but since they were first introduced to North Park (near Walden and Gould) in 1978, the huge ruminants have thrived in our relatively arid high-alpine environs.
There are literally thousands of moose now, ranging from Winter Park in the east to nearly Grand Junction in the west, where a small herd of just under 100 moose was introduced on the nearby Grand Mesa over the last several years.
Colorado Division of Wildlife (CDOW) spokesman Randy Hampton said the moose shot Saturday night was a young bull, and that investigators want to talk to the driver and passengers of a white four-door sedan spotted in the area around the time of the shooting.
It is legal to hunt moose with a proper tag during the correct season, but they are not currently in season. Most moose are accidentally shot by elk hunters, some of whom don’t even know the animals are part of the state’s wildlife population. One sure sign is that, unlike elk, moose typically do not run from humans.
Call the CDOW’s Hot Sulphur Springs’ office at (970) 725-6200 with any information, or make an anonymous report at Operation Game Thief at (877) 265-6648.
Courtesy of the U.S. Ski Team
My Birds of Prey predictions came up just short, but now I'm calling for a powder day at Vail
December 8, 2008 —
I missed out on my Beaver Creek Birds of Prey World Cup predictions by the same slim margin Benny Raich edged Ted Ligety in the giant slalom (GS) on Sunday. Ligety lost out by one-hundredth of a second. I lost out by two seconds and a DNF.
Scroll down for my original picks and you’ll see that I chickened out in the super-combined, which was cancelled anyway due to a snowstorm on Thursday, but then picked Bode Miller to win the downhill, Hermann Maier the super-G and Ligety the GS.
Miller was leading the downhill when he crashed on Friday, so I would have nailed that one if he had finished (but then you can say that about all of Bode’s races); Maier was second to downhill winner Aksel Lund Svindal in the super-G Saturday (although it wasn’t really close); and then Ligety looked like he had the GS before losing a ton of time on the bottom and just missing out.
So if close counts for anything, I was there. Now let’s hope I come a little closer in calling the weather. Some forecasters are calling for 4-8 inches overnight in the Vail Valley. Others are calling for less, and some say we’ll get more. My call? I saw we get 6 inches in Vail and 4 at the Beav. Both worthy of calling in sick from work.
Regardless, we’re in pretty good shape for this early in the season, and the big crowds over the weekend at Vail and Beaver Creek seemed to know that. I got out for Day 4 on Saturday and made some very nice turns in Game Creek and on the Front Side of Vail Mountain. Our time was too limited to jump into the newly opened Back Bowls, where the wait was 45 minutes on Chair 5.
Though I got deathly ill over the weekend, likely contracting some sort of foreign bug from a Euro journalist here for the World Cup, it was, as always, a great time. A little more American success would have been nice, and it would be nice if Red Tail could be opened to enable race fans to ski to the finish area. But overall, another great show by the Vail Valley Foundation and Vail Resorts.
Final note, as I write this at about 2 p.m. Monday (mountain time), it has just started snowing pretty hard in West Vail. Looking like a pow day Tuesday.
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