Gore Conditions (2014-2015)

We headed up top and found excellent snow on Chati and Hawkeye.  Did 5 laps on the Straightbrook.  We Clouded out to head back down for lunch, and when we passed by Open Pit found a crew of patrollers evacuating the High Peaks chair.  The guys in the chairs directly above Open Pit said they had been there for almost an hour and a half.  At least they were in the sun, I feel really bad for anyone who was stuck down in the shadows.  It was single digits.  We asked if there was anything we could do to help, but of course there wasn't.  I don't know what the problem is with the lift, but it can't be good if they had to do an evac.  I just feel really bad for everyone who was stuck, and of course I'm thankful my family wasn't stuck there.  At least it wasn't breezy.  Here's a pic of one of the chairs getting evac'd:


Other than that we had a great day.  Summit was great, though the High Peaks chair shutdown nixed our plans to ski the darkside.  Got in some woods and found some quality snow.  Front side trails skied very nicely.  Uncas was great with very nice gunpow.  I had heard the North Quad was down, but we found it running and did a late day (3pm-ish) run down through the Tahawus Glade, so I guess whatever problem they had there got fixed.

So let's get this all in one post. At various points today the Hudson Chair, Burnt Ridge Chair, Darkside Chair (evac), AND the North Chair all were down or having trouble? Ugh.

YUKON CORNELIUS wrote

So let's get this all in one post. At various points today the Hudson Chair, Burnt Ridge Chair, Darkside Chair (evac), AND the North Chair all were down or having trouble? Ugh.

And I think the above post is a very rosy picture of the mountain today. I heard reports from multiple people that it was not very good. I know Jeff likes to be optimistic, but after skiing what looked like beautiful conditions at West, I'd imagine today was a little bit of a letdown. A mountain that should be in better condition (after a good month of snowmaking) is not.

Sad.

I'm at an event right now:

So I'll post a few more pics in the morning but the skiing was quite good.  We thought the mtn was in good shape snow-wise

* * * EDIT - just posted a short trip report here

Gore skied very good today, rode the high peaks chair at least 5 times no idea it went down.  Burnt ridge quad sounded like it was running on diesel.  Echo was very fun with the manmade blizzard, twister was very good.  Biggest neg was the cold this morning.

Mainly skied the lower parts of the mountain with family today. Still really crowded, which is to be expected. Things got a little wet late, but friends told me it was all snow up top. Word on the street is that "there is a problem with the gearbox on the Summit chair and they are not sure exactly what." (I saw a picture on twitter of the evac that looks pretty gnarly.) Fireworks were awesome.

Much different day today than yesterday.  Gone were the bluebird skies, and good snow was harder to find up top.  But the big difference was the crowds.  We arrived a bit late and cars were already parked well down the access road.  I can always find a spot to park up above, but not today.  When we left, it appeared cars were parked clear down to Lot H - that's the lot that's nearly all the way down to Peaceful Valley Rd.  Lodge was something of a zoo.  

Up top we hit a glade or two before deciding to make a summit -> Burnt Ridge trek.  Upper Newton was hammered hard.  Can't call it "MacIntyre."  Daniel, our 11-yr-old, dubbed it GapeIntyre, which we all thought was pretty funny.

High Peaks chair did not come back online today.  Those trails were open, but of course you had to ski through to the North Quad.  That fit in well with our summit -> BRQ trek, which we did by way of Birch Bark Alley.  That glade had some very nice snow, and I think it will probably stay below the radar and receive little traffic due to the odd location of the entrance, so that's good news in my book.

Pipeline was fine, seemed to be a lot of people doing the traverse today.  We were skiing with another family of 4, so we had 8 in our group.  Long story short, we got our group strung out a bit on the traverse and we arrived at BRQ missing Sylvie.  Somehow she had diverted herself to the Ski Bowl.  We alerted patrol and waited (well, I waited while everyone else did a lap) for her to get escorted back.  It turns out she never went all the way to the Ski Bowl.  Instead, she got to that second bridge that connects back to Eagles Nest and waited there, and another family escorted her down to BRQ to us before Patrol even found her.  All ended well, but we all learned a good lesson that even after logging literally a hundred plus family ski days at Gore over the past 5 or 6 years, shit can still happen.

Echo had superb snow, so we logged a couple laps on that.  Probably the best snow on the mountain.  Tahawus Glade was also quite nice (again).

It started to snow lightly on our last run or two, a little ice or sleet mixed in at the bottom.  Hopefully the fireworks went off well (I guess they did per Yuke's report ^^).  We didn't stick around as we had to meet up with family back in Bolton Landing for supper.

As for yesterday's evac on the High Peaks chair, an insider from the mountain told me it's been 11 years since an evac was necessary.  I also got an explanation for BRQ running on diesel backup on Saturday.  Apparently there a flaky sensor on Tower 4 that gives an occassional false reading.  The only way they can override it is by running the lift in diesel backup mode.  It was running on electric today (though it still sounded noisy to me).

I'll add a couple more tidbits to Jeff's excellent review (as usual):

As many Gore faithful likely know, having the High Peaks chair out of commission is no good. It's extra bad news on a very very busy day like yesterday where one is forced to take the gondola for access to the summit trails. After skiing Burnt Ridge, the north side, and Showcase first thing in the morning (using uncrowded AEII for the latter), I bit the bullet and lined up for the gondola around 11:00 which took 15-20 minutes. After that fiasco, I stayed up top until at least after 1:00 knowing I wasn't going to get up there again after grabbing lunch.

In the gondi line, I overheard many people complaining about the near 1 to 1 1/2 hour wait at the ticket booths in the morning.  Apparently, the entire "uplink" connection to the credit card processing systems went down and lines, as you can imagine, grew quickly. Cash and pre-paid tickets still worked, however, but nobody knew what was going on so those folks were stuck in the lines behind the credit card people.  One guy I rode the gondi with said he got to the ticket line about 9:00 and at 11ish was going to be his first run.

Last additional point that Jeff didn't mention... the ski bowl. It seemed they were somewhat hasty in getting the connection and the bowl trails opened up for this weekend.  While they all had coverage (except the obvious 46er), thin cover signs abound were not a necessary warning since it was obvious from the dirt/snow mix across all the trails pretty much all the way to the bowl area. I didn't encounter any rocks in the two runs I made there, however, a single storm or another round of snowmaking and grooming will have them in better shape.

Adk Jeff wrote

Up top we hit a glade or two before deciding to make a summit -> Burnt Ridge trek.  Upper Newton was hammered hard.  Can't call it "MacIntyre."  Daniel, our 11-yr-old, dubbed it GapeIntyre, which we all thought was pretty funny.

Adk Jeff wrote

Pipeline was fine, seemed to be a lot of people doing the traverse today.  We were skiing with another family of 4, so we had 8 in our group.  Long story short, we got our group strung out a bit on the traverse and we arrived at BRQ missing Sylvie.  Somehow she had diverted herself to the Ski Bowl.  We alerted patrol and waited (well, I waited while everyone else did a lap) for her to get escorted back.  It turns out she never went all the way to the Ski Bowl.  Instead, she got to that second bridge that connects back to Eagles Nest and waited there, and another family escorted her down to BRQ to us before Patrol even found her.  All ended well, but we all learned a good lesson that even after logging literally a hundred plus family ski days at Gore over the past 5 or 6 years, shit can still happen.

Sounds like you were cool about it, I think my heart would have been in my throat.

CP, that slow line for tickets has been a persistent problem for years.  I don't know why they can't seem to get that fixed.
We didn't ski the Ski Bowl trails, but I had heard they were a bit scratchy.  We'll probably start using the Ski Bowl as our base next weekend.  It would have been ideal yesterday to get away from the horrendous crowds at the main base, but we were connecting with friends blah blah blah.

Harv, "gaper" wasn't even part of Daniel's vocabulary until I let him watch that "How To Be a Skier" video a few weeks back.  He and Sylvie now have this whole routine they do: "This hot chocolate it TOO hot!" etc. etc. etc.
I guess there's worse things he could get off the internet.

I guess I was a bit anxious until we got S back, but there was really no other place for her to have gone other than the Ski Bowl and I was confident she'd know what to do and Ski Patrol would round her up pretty quickly.  She was a little upset at first but basically forgot about the whole thing within a run.  What we did wrong as a group was to leave that intersection at the first bridge on Pipeline without confirming that everyone in our group had gone the right way.  Rookie mistake.  We all knew what to do, but we screwed up the execution. That's easy to do when you've got an extended group skiing together rather than say just our family group of 4.  

Same here = not thinking anything truly bad would happen, but with Neve's situation there would definitely be fears and tears.

Adk Jeff wrote

Harv, "gaper" wasn't even part of Daniel's vocabulary until I let him watch that "How To Be a Skier" video a few weeks back.  

Don't show him this:

http://unofficialnetworks.com/gnar

CPTele wrote

I'll add a couple more tidbits to Jeff's excellent review (as usual):

As many Gore faithful likely know, having the High Peaks chair out of commission is no good. It's extra bad news on a very very busy day like yesterday where one is forced to take the gondola for access to the summit trails. After skiing Burnt Ridge, the north side, and Showcase first thing in the morning (using uncrowded AEII for the latter), I bit the bullet and lined up for the gondola around 11:00 which took 15-20 minutes. After that fiasco, I stayed up top until at least after 1:00 knowing I wasn't going to get up there again after grabbing lunch.

In the gondi line, I overheard many people complaining about the near 1 to 1 1/2 hour wait at the ticket booths in the morning.  Apparently, the entire "uplink" connection to the credit card processing systems went down and lines, as you can imagine, grew quickly. Cash and pre-paid tickets still worked, however, but nobody knew what was going on so those folks were stuck in the lines behind the credit card people.  One guy I rode the gondi with said he got to the ticket line about 9:00 and at 11ish was going to be his first run.

Last additional point that Jeff didn't mention... the ski bowl. It seemed they were somewhat hasty in getting the connection and the bowl trails opened up for this weekend.  While they all had coverage (except the obvious 46er), thin cover signs abound were not a necessary warning since it was obvious from the dirt/snow mix across all the trails pretty much all the way to the bowl area. I didn't encounter any rocks in the two runs I made there, however, a single storm or another round of snowmaking and grooming will have them in better shape.

Until the ATMs ran out of $.

My take on Sunday:

Yes there were cars lined up on the mountain road far below Lot F by the time we pulled in around 10:15/10:30.  Luckily we did not listen to the attendant who said there were "about 200 cars" waiting to drop off at the base lodge and I told my wife to drive on.  We pulled right in to the drop-off.  

Gondi line was pretty long, but the AEII loads pretty quickly, so even there it was not a long wait, less than 3 minutes.

North side was pretty good -- not too many icy patches.  Pete Gay has good snow as does Tahawus.  We did Rabbit Run a couple of times which is just a trail through the woods but fun for the girls.  We saw TONS of people ducking the rope and skiing down Powder Pass.

My oldest had a lot of homework that was weighing on her mind, so we took Showcase down at 12:30 and it was strangely empty.  Skied really well.  We had an early lunch and found a place to sit in the base lodge pretty easily (must have been lucky).  Oldest took the town shuttle back to the Summit around 1.

We took the AEII back up, no real line at 1:00.  North Side was not crowded -- the lift was ski-on the rest of the day.  We then took Twister down for the first time b/c the middle one wanted to leave at 2:30.  Great trail, skied really well, but it was super crowded.

After my wife picked up the middle one, the youngest and I headed back up to the summit.  Took the gondi, no real wait at 2:45.  We took Pine Knot -- not as difficult as I had feared.  A lot of snow, some bumps.  Not too many icy patches.

We skied Cloud to Headwaters, then back up to Open Pit to Headwaters to Tannery.  All of these skied well.  By the time we got the triple back up, they had closed Pine Knot and Uncas/Topridge.  We managed to get one more run down Tahawus before they closed the North Side.

Coming down Sunway, it was ice and sleet.  That combined with the dim light and we could barely see.  That was our only time down Sunway the entire day.  It still has many (too many) scraped down patches between the Showcase and Quicksilver entrances.

Petronio

Adk Jeff wrote

GapeIntyre,  pretty funny.

Adk Jeff wrote

 
Long story short, we got our group strung out a bit on the traverse and we arrived at BRQ missing Sylvie.

need a designated 'sweep'

mattchuck2 wrote

Adk Jeff wrote

Harv, "gaper" wasn't even part of Daniel's vocabulary until I let him watch that "How To Be a Skier" video a few weeks back.  

Don't show him this:
http://unofficialnetworks.com/gnar

Yeah, I'll hold off on that one for now. :)

freeheeln wrote

Adk Jeff wrote

 
Long story short, we got our group strung out a bit on the traverse and we arrived at BRQ missing Sylvie.

need a designated 'sweep'

That was me.  The lead group got to the Peaceful Valley / Eagles Nest intersection (the upper bridge) and kept skiing.  Sylvie was in the middle and made the wrong turn.  When I got there she was already gone, I assumed she was with the group ahead.  We violated the rule of waiting at the intersection to make sure everyone makes the right turn.

Shaman had a quote for today and I think I am messing it up but "Make your own fun day!i"  What a fun day.  It was work to get at the Dark side but well worth it.  The woods are skiing well and they really had Lies and Hawkeye in great shape.  I really loved the bumps on the liftline part of straightbrook glades.

I see the High Peaks chair is back on line.  Anybody know the details on what happened to it?  Maybe Saturday's evac will lend some urgency to getting it replaced sooner rather than later.

Ah, but such a charming, quaint and for the most part a wind free ride. I hope any new lift there stays lower than the trees and it's path stays narrow.

^+1

Dropping down through Woodin or the Wood lots and seeing that old lift, you felt like you've gone through a time warp.