Game changer: Ski Ward MA - 1st outdoor area to open in the East

Was 'the post' a ski resort marker starting to show through the snowpack?
Metal post sticking out 1 inch used to secure non-visible and the fully buried wooden snow fence in a middle of a cattrack. Still doing physio and haven't receive a green light for skiing yet. I was right above when I saw it, tried to avoid it, but straddled it and awkwardly fell and dislocated my elbow with a few other damages to ligaments and micro fractures.
 
I will inspect the area in question at Mammoth hopefully before Christmas. It had lost its snow and was closed long before my July and August visits. I can understand why there would be a snow fence in that saddle not far below Chair 5&9 exits at the top of Gold Hill given the obvious wind exposure.
 
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I'm going to be "that guy" and call BS. Pointless magic carpet opening (likely for at best one or two days to boot) is not an opening. Abasin could probably accomplish the same in August if it wanted to. Fun for them locally to get on the news, but certainly not actually notable or worth any larger consideration IMHO. Pretty soon I can just rent a couple shaved ice sno-cone makers and dump the 'snow' on the ground in my backyard and call myself an "open" ski area.

Abasin likes it.
:)

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Of course it counts. Whether anyone here would be motivated to ski it, even if living nearby, is a different question. I would not be motivated for October A-Basin either due to the horrendous lift line for just one run. Mammoth's August 2023 closing was also subject to excessive lines, which is why I was not there for its closing day and left before 9AM on the previous day.

I have skied three opening days lifetime, all of them due to substantial early snowfalls:
12/18/1987 at Mt. Baldy
10/30/2004 at Snow Summit
10/29/2021 at Mammoth

I see the attraction for such events (monthly ski streaks included), but I have minimum quality standards to partake of them myself.
 
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Average from the 60 indoor area (snow) with vertical numbers on SkiResort.info is 31.1m.
45 area have little or no detail.

SnoOslo is at 80m is an outlier and second biggest tied with one in China and France.

Ski Dubai is 85m has the biggest vertical.

BigSnow (36m) is 17th out of 60. Higher that all the indoors in the UK and Japan. The planned indoor area in Virginia is suppose to be 30m. Ten indoors are 50m or greater.
Found this numbers on Google.

"Across its 160-foot (50-m) vertical drop, Big Snow is made up of what are basically three trails across one continuous slope (there are technically four trails, but the blue-rated Switchback and green-rated Perfect Slope trails are really just different halves of the same run)."

SkiResort.info says 36m and my watch agrees with 36m. Definitely not 50m.
 
I can't help but laugh when I read this thread. I grew up two towns over from "Ward Hill" (as it was known in the 60's) and I, more or less, learned to ski there, as a kid. It had, maybe, 200 feet of "vertical" with a T-bar and, I think, 1 or 2 rope tows. Typical small, local, central New England ski hill. My junior high school had an after-school ski program one day a week, where we would be bussed over to Ward for an hour or two of skiing and I would also go there sometimes with my older siblings as they had night skiing.
I can't remember if they had snow making but those were the days when even central New England had cold and snowy (for the most part) winters and ski areas could survive on natural snow (most of the time).
I had a GI Joe when I was a kid (who didn't?) and I had the GI Joe "ski patrol" outfit (see link below) and I can remember bringing him over to Ward Hill and letting him slide down the hill, after the lifts had closed, so he could do some "real" skiing. Some of the ski patrol came out and they were laughing about the skiing GI Joe.

 
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