Crystal chair Cluster @#*# 12/10/10

Good skiing the powder settled a little from the day before so there was a little more resistance from yesterday's skiing and a load more people. Still good skiing the cut up chunder on the north facing slopes later in the day. Sun affected the snow on the exposed faces and the chop was a little more to drive. When the Fog rolled in and you could feel the sun crust on the untouched sun exposed slopes. Will be interesting tomorrow with the change in weather to a pineapple express.

Something really needs to be done about Chinook Express! It broke down today for another 1/2 hour and the natives were getting pissed, including myself. I'm just tired of it everyday breaking down for at least 15 minutes. Crystal has got to fix this vital chair to get access to mid mountain!
The patrolwomen came up and said to the crowd of disgruntled customers you could take Discovery and boot from there to Forest Queen and nearly in the same breath she said chair 6 and Southback are open...Yeah right well how we going to get there from down here??? We paid to use the lifts that keep breaking down! So we wait it out another 15 minutes while the powder is getting tracked out then they reopen Chinook. So all the booters see it's open and start to ski back to the chair.
After we get up there Chair 6 has a problem and closes. That's OK because Southback is still open. And again, how we going to get there???
I'm fed up with it, all the maintenance folks are busy working on the Gondola and not taking care of business at hand. For all I care the Gondola could open in the Spring, but let me have a way to ski the powder now since I'm paying to ski the lift!

Smug in our getting up early, we enjoyed the short lines while Chinook was down. Got ours after heading to 6 only to find at the top of FQ that 6 had broke down as well even though the signs said Open. Talked to "someone" at the bottom that said they keep replacing the broken part on Chinook with a new one and can't figure out what is causing it to fail. An excellent morning of light pow and blue sky. Might be the last for a while as nastiness moving in for sunday and monday and tomorrow will be sketchy on today's sun baked aspects.
web.me.com/snowind/Winter/Kkz_Ski_Blog/E...erFor_Breakfast.html

Kkz

The wife and I just finished our 5th trip on 6 when it quit. There was a very serious smell of electrical fire.
We had other obligations so decided to call it a day. Did they get it running? What about the people on the lift did they have to rope them off?

Smug in our getting up early, we enjoyed the short lines while Chinook was down. 

We got untracked up top bright and early early too, but decided to do a Top to Bottom, and this season that is playing roulette on Chinook. It usually breaks down around 11-11:30 daily, but yesterday and today it was down by 10am. That need to to be fixed!

Side note: a good share of frequent flier skiers went down Right Angle trees, did not cross any ropes of closed signs. But waiting at the bottom was the patrol. They busted them for skiing a closed area, even though they said they did not cross any ropes or signs. I do believe the skiers because there was about 15 of them who do not want to lose their season passes. The young patrol said that it was impossible to not see the closures because he marked them. Uhm...not sure he know the mountain well enough to make that claim. One of the patrol at the top of the mountain said the Right Angle was open before they went down. Sound like it is a little fishy to me. The patrol needs to get on the same page and if it is closed rope it off. Crossing a rope is the definitive way to know you are by a closed area.

I didn’t get stuck on Chinook (or even know that Chinook was down).  After hearing the weather report there were a lot of people at Crystal who skipped out on work (like me).  On a day like today rolling up to the lift line at 8:45 (again like me) isn’t early enough.  The frontside was great, but it would have been better if I were on one of the first few chairs.  No one was on Chair 6 most of the morning which allowed numerous laps with fresh pow.  I got stuck for probably 10 minutes on the chair, which afterward they decided to close for the rest of the day.  However, on my last ride up they had just opened Southback and I got some solid untracked down Southeast Trees.   Silver Basin looked so good that I swapped my skis for my AT setup and skinned up with Art from the Mountaineers in the Afternoon.  It was great, but required harder work and the next weather system started to eat away at the bluebird.  Tomorrow should be good as long as it doesn’t warm up.  There are lots of lines left in Silver Basin, and it’s currently snowing lightly up here.

I only took video in the morning, and got a little over excited with the “edge detection” effect in Movie Maker. 

contour.com/stories/december-10-2010-cry...uebird-and-fresh-pow

Ps.  I would appreciate all the views and thumbs up on the Contour video site as I’m hoping to win one of their newer cameras.

Hey, that was me!  Here's my advice.  Always carry skins and avy gear at Crystal for when the chairs break!  We made lemonade.  Silver Basin was the some of the best pow I've had in a long time.  Nice skiing with you.