EMSC
Well-known member
Definitely still behind, but catching up.
Only a couple more trails open at Eldora today than previously (Indian Peaks lift opens Friday); but what was open was skiing quite well. Nice & soft, with nearly all the snowmaking covered by soft natural snow. Eldora has received roughly 3 feet in the past 2 weeks and they even opened a run or two on the front for a few hours yesterday for skier compaction. Other runs have been ski cut, etc... I suspect if they could get another 12-18" of new snow it would open quite a bit of terrain.
Today started off very windy (they topped out with an 83MPH gust overnight), with the wind slowly dropping from ~30mph to ~5-10 by the time I left at 3pm. The air temps were surprising in that at the 5:30am snow report it was 1F, but by mid-morning it was already into the the low 20's... I had expected a much slower warming, and was a bit overdressed.
The snowmaking progress has been very unusual this year with nearly everything on 'little hawk mountain' open (that would be the lower beginner zones, race training lane, etc...). I'm not sure if its a new normal, or driven by the weird early season this year. Normally IP lift would be open before very much of little hawk would get snowmaking. At any rate, they are already making snow to and from Corona lift, but Corona itself is so wide it takes 6-8 days historically to get that open. Assuming they start tonight, that puts Corona at roughly Dec 28.
I bumped into a couple of folks I knew and took a couple runs with them. There were even random 2-3 minute lift lines today, varying from none to a line almost every other run for no apparent reason. Demand is pretty pent up after last year and the horrid early season.
Only a couple more trails open at Eldora today than previously (Indian Peaks lift opens Friday); but what was open was skiing quite well. Nice & soft, with nearly all the snowmaking covered by soft natural snow. Eldora has received roughly 3 feet in the past 2 weeks and they even opened a run or two on the front for a few hours yesterday for skier compaction. Other runs have been ski cut, etc... I suspect if they could get another 12-18" of new snow it would open quite a bit of terrain.
Today started off very windy (they topped out with an 83MPH gust overnight), with the wind slowly dropping from ~30mph to ~5-10 by the time I left at 3pm. The air temps were surprising in that at the 5:30am snow report it was 1F, but by mid-morning it was already into the the low 20's... I had expected a much slower warming, and was a bit overdressed.
The snowmaking progress has been very unusual this year with nearly everything on 'little hawk mountain' open (that would be the lower beginner zones, race training lane, etc...). I'm not sure if its a new normal, or driven by the weird early season this year. Normally IP lift would be open before very much of little hawk would get snowmaking. At any rate, they are already making snow to and from Corona lift, but Corona itself is so wide it takes 6-8 days historically to get that open. Assuming they start tonight, that puts Corona at roughly Dec 28.
I bumped into a couple of folks I knew and took a couple runs with them. There were even random 2-3 minute lift lines today, varying from none to a line almost every other run for no apparent reason. Demand is pretty pent up after last year and the horrid early season.