Opening Weekend at Jackson Creek Summit

 Yesterday was opening day at Jackson Creek Summit. It was exciting to welcome guests into the renovated Summit Center, now named the Sugar Maple Chalet. It was fun to watch our long time season pass holders check out all the changes we'd made to a place they've been so familiar with over the years. Who knew carpeting and anti-slip vinyl flooring could be such an exciting change. 

The rental shop is finally finished and welcomed it's first renters yesterday. The space turned out great thanks to the hard work from many hands. It's so neat to see families get outfitted in their gear before heading straight onto the beginner slopes, just a few steps away. Our staff particularly appreciates the opportunity to watch their customers take their first turns, instead of being stuck in the windowless shop they previously called home. 

We did have a few hang-ups in our plan that caused us to modify our operations for opening day and the rest of the weekend. As part of the construction of the new ticket windows, we needed to create another IT room with new network switches to support all of the additional salespoints on the west side of the building. Unfortunately, one of the critical components necessary to connect our existing equipment with the new, hasn't arrived yet. We anticipated having it available on Friday, but it is now looking like it won't arrive on-site until Monday the 19th. Without this piece of technology, the computers on the West side of the chalet are unable to process transactions. This has forced us to close the Sugar Maple Café, Mountain Shop and Outdoor Ticket windows through the rest of the weekend. 

The Mountain Shop at Jackson Creek Summit - 12/17/2022

Despite the setback, our teams keep pushing forward. The Mountain Shop is coming together beautifully. The new track lighting was installed over the past week and Eliza and her team have been working non-stop on inventorying, tagging and displaying all of the jackets, gloves, goggles and more to be ready when the store can finally open sometime in the coming week. 

New ticket windows nearing completion - 12/17/2022

We've started to move the computers into the new ticket windows along with all the accessories that allow us to sell you a ticket, rent a pair of skis or get you set up with a lesson. While I'd hoped to have this ready to go by the time we opened yesterday, it has still been an accomplishment to get to this point in such a short amount of time. Less than two months ago, this space was just a dingy corner of the chalet and a set of rotten stairs leading from the second story. Check out my first blog post to see what we started with!

Terrain Expansion

The mountain crew is stoked to have cooler temperatures again and jumped back into snowmaking shortly after close yesterday. The team at Black River Basin is nearing the end as they work to put finishing touches on Family X, Lower Spillway, Cameron Spur and Upper Steiger's Mill. With forecasted temperatures in the single digits and below throughout the next week, we're anticipating wrapping up with snowmaking over there before next weekend. Once all the snow is made, the groomers will get to work pushing it around and building out the runs. If all goes well, by Christmas, we may have a whole mountain open for skiing and riding. 

Snowguns running on Borealis - 12/17/2022

Over on The Summit side we got off to a little bit of a late start due to all of the system upgrades we undertook this fall, so we only have about a week of snowmaking under our belt so far this season. Thankfully mother nature appears to be back on our side. We're completing the finishing touches on Borealis (Leelinaw) and Alpenglow (Old Flambeau). Borealis is one of our key race trails and therefore takes quite a bit more snow to be considered complete. With a number of races on the schedule for early January, we need to make sure things are in prime shape before moving on. Nevertheless, I anticipate we'll wrap up our snowmaking campaign on those two trails sometime early this week. From there we're moving on to FIS and Nimbus (Winnebago). 

The terrain off the East, West and Bear Creek lifts is primarily reliant on natural snowfall to open. I went out in a snowcat last week to do some packing before this weeks storm and felt pretty good about what I saw. There are still a few wet spots poking through from the heavy rains we received before our first snows, but with the subzero temps in the forecast, I expect to see some of those tighten up. Once things freeze up all we need is another 6" to a foot of new snow and we should be ready to pop open some additional natural terrain. With any luck storms forecasted for the middle of next week will deliver the goods just in time for the holidays. Pray for snow!

 Snowfall forecast from Opensnow.com for the next week.