WF lifts and wind

Coach Z wrote

Its pretty cool that Aaron and Mike Pratt just need to log onto this site and they can get all the VOC that they want (and probably some that they don't).

There is good and bad VOC. People will tell you they want everything for nothing, don't we all. My real job is in research and sometimes that is market research. There are certain types of tools that get at what customers really want and most importantly, what they are willing to pay for. VOC is useless if you don't know what people are really willing to pay, what are the things that are expected and what are the "nice to haves". There are sophisticated marketing tools to ferret this out and a message board is not one of them.

One thing we have to realize with both Gore and WF is that the mission on these two businesses is different than other resorts and the planning horizon is also much different. If you don't agree - read ORDA's mission statement:
http://www.orda.org/corporate/pdf/policy/Mission_Statement_Perf_Measures_and_summary_report_%283%29.pdf

Big take away from me is orda venue visitation is up 2% but bed tax is up 11%.  That means that Orda is bringing it in terms in economic impact for the ADK region.  Great Job

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Some are trying to approach this WF wind problem with rational thinking and comparison, and proposing actual, perhaps even workable solutions. But they are completely missing the point: the key word someone mentioned in this thread is the "curse", and its on me. After the utmost careful planning to avoid the largest crowds and the almost certain pres. day windhold, I brought my family to WF this Tue (pm) - Thu.

Wed and Thu turned out just fine, no winds, great planning on my part  (at least half of each day most major lifts on windhold).
Before that, on Tue early afternoon, just as I decided to try out HH and entering the loading area of the Lookout chair, the lift went down for the day (the staff said it was overheating ???).

So I must reconsider what steps I have to make in the future before my family visits to WF, likely leaving me no other options than ritual sacrifices.

Today (Fri) looks like a nice day to ski, as far as I can tell looking through my office window.

ausable skier wrote

That was possibly the worst routing that they could have chosen.  It put it right in the prevailng wind tunnel that is the notch.  The best route would have been from out of where the pay parking lot is (Snowballs would have loved that one) and run to the the flat spot on the very top of Excelisor so that it would have been protected by the ridge on LWF from the prevailing wind.

I don't really understand the route that you were proposing as the gondola would not start in the convenient location that it does now and you would have to hike to get to where it is.  I think that the current route is probably the most convenient for the majority of skiers as the bottom terminal is right next to the lodge.  I think that having wind fences at the notch would be a relatively inexpensive solution, compared to having a very complex route that is inconvenient for access from the lodge, or a new lift that would only really serve a purpose on wind hold days.  Killington has wind fences at a very very windy spot on the Skyeship 2 and they help alot as I have never seen it on wind hold.  I do think that all of the ideas on this page could help solve the wind problem, so this is just another idea.

endoftheline wrote

I think the only way you could keep WF open when its windy would be a bunch of T-Bars and rope tows. Which would be nice during storms because as we all know the lifts rarely spin during a snowstorm.

Or you could replace the gondola with a funitel which is just a really big gondola (20 people per cabin) with towers like the ones on LWF and Mtn run.  There are 2 haulropes that the gondolas are attached to, so the nasty crosswinds at the notch would be no problem since the wind would have to blow against two cables to swing the cabins.  Those things can operate in up to 60 mph sustained winds.  The only 2 problems that I could envision are the cost (probably at least 10 million), and the capacity of a funitel (up to 4000 people an hour) is way too much for the LWF trail pod, especially with only 1 blue trail.  I do suppose though that there could be less cabins than the design so that the capacity could be more, but not astronomically more, than the current gondola.  This will NEVER happen.  I'm playing fantasy ski area management.