A Good Night

Last night was a good night. We received 10 inches of new snow and had 12 guns running at Black River Basin from midnight on. I went out with the crew this morning and got the first guns of the season running at Jackson Creek Summit. Funny enough the first gun we fired up happened to be labeled gun #1. It feels great to be making snow across both mountains.

As I write, the crew is still working on getting the snowmaking system fully up and running. It will be a good run from now until mid-day tomorrow when we’ll need to shut the guns down for warmer temps. The forecast for the weekend looks very good for snowmaking. We should be able to make a significant amount of snow, getting more terrain closer to opening.

About Powder Thursday

The snow we received in the last 24 hours is fairly wet and heavy, not exactly the UP powder we know and love. While not the best for deep powder runs, this wet snow will help to create a solid base, especially in the glades and on our steeper terrain. We’ll likely have a few pockets of ungroomed snow here and there for Thursday but for the most part we’ll be packing it in with the snowcats. Track packing with the snowcats compacts the snow and pushes frost into the ground which has the benefit of preventing the snow from blowing away, helps capture drifting snow and stops it from melting from underneath. An all around win for skiing conditions a bit later in the season.

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Concrete Time

With all of the snow melted and the hill dried out, the team from Ruotsala has focused their efforts on getting each of the tower foundations poured. The new lift will have 10 total towers along the line. Tower 1 sits immediately outside the bottom terminal, and tower 10 is just downhill from the top terminal. Those two tower bases will be excavated and poured alongside their respective terminal foundations. For now, our work has begun at tower 9, near the summit, and is progressing downhill as the access road gets built. The first step of each tower build is to excavate the tower location down to the precise elevation required according to the size and height of the footing. Once excavated and elevations are verified, soil bearing analysis must be completed to ensure the soil conditions are suitable for the new tower to be placed on. Our friends at Coleman Engineering out of Ironwood perform a series of tests in each excavation to evaluate the soil's ability to bear weight. Once

July Already?!

In the month since I last sat down to chronicle all the activity on the mountain, we have accomplished A LOT. The team from Ruotsalas has completed pouring concrete and backfilled the foundations for Towers 2-10. This leaves Tower 1 and all four terminal foundations to complete but is still a big milestone as it allows us to revegetate the access roads created to reach tower locations on the side of the hill. The rest of the pours are much more easily accessible via pre-existing and solid roadways, meaning rainy weather is much less of a threat to our forward progress. Tower 9 foundation is backfilled with grass already growing. -7/8/2023 With the Tower foundations substantially completed, the focus shifts to the top and bottom terminal locations. At the bottom, we are undertaking a massive regrading project to improve skier access to the lift from both the east and the west sides. The loading mound of the former triple lift has been completely removed and redistributed at the bottom

Extreme Makeover - Ski Resort Edition

As I walk around the mountains, it's starting to feel like I'm in the middle of one of those reality TV shows where a new home gets built in a week. In just over a month since our closing day, we've gotten started on too many projects to count in all areas of the resort. Without 100s of volunteers, we'll take a bit longer to get done. Still, I'm confident that Snowriver will feel like a totally different place when our guests return this fall. Here's a quick run-through of what we've been up to. Voyageur Express Preparation The mountain crew had a monumental task on their hands to dismantle, remove and scrap three chairlifts made up of over 5 miles of steel cable, 65 steel towers, 6 terminal structures, and 3 concrete vaults. Once all the towers had been cut and hauled up to the overflow lot, work began on torching them apart to allow them to be loaded onto trailers for the trip to the scrap yard. To date, we've hauled 160,000 pounds of metal to the sc

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