Northway lift at Crystal

Today Eric Mohler and I biked and hiked up Kelly's Gap Road to the base of the green valley chair then up to the ridge, to the lodge, then down the ridge to the summit of Northway. Saw Keith Rollins biking to the top.
Here's a shot from just down the summit of the clear cut where the chair will be.
An employee at the base told me that they are taking off the top of Northway Peak and flattening it out. (Mixed emotions here.)

After taking it all in we biked down the Northway Trail and ended up at Sand Flats and a large pile of stacked logs from the operation.

Could this actually be the end of the dreaded Ho-Chi-Min Trail? Could this be the end of run after run butt deep powder? We'll see!

This lift may increase lift service terrain, but it doesn't increase actual skiable terrain a appreciable amount. Most of the area this lift will service was accessable via a short uphill skate. If fact it may decrease the amount of terrain easily accessable by lift if they stop running the shuttle. The base of the lift is only down by the large tree island on Northway trail. There is a lot of vertical below this. I hiked up to the base of the lift via northway trail on Saturday, to see how hard it will be to boot up from the bottom of northway. The base of the lift is almost 1000 feet in elevation above the northway shuttle stop. All the out of bounds terrain will either see a lot more traffic due to the easier access or no traffic, once they stop running the bus due to a lack of interest for the in bounds skiers going down the typically poor northway snow conditions. One new run that has been added is the lift line. If they do some trimming in the woods, to make the trees skiable there will be a significant amount of skiable area added.