Alpental coming soon

Appropriate to give thanks this morning to the positive interaction we've had and support shown during this fall's set up for operations.  All of our contacts have been pretty positive, no conflict and very little negative feedback.  Also would like to respond to the question regarding non-control days.  This one is a bit harder than it might seem.  Over the last couple seasons we have been making an effort to revisit our pre-planning and review how well we might have done to consistently communicate a control schedule. While not an awful report card, it's certainly not foolproof enough to keep the crew and/or the uphill traveler from a potentially harmful interaction.  The real culprit is our NW weather.  Even the guru's down at the avalanche center are surprised by the difference between forecast and factual more often than they would like to be.  Early arrival and/or heavier than forecast precipitation can make for very quickly developing hazard.  On borderline forecasts we will often bring in a crew early for the evaluation of conditions and find areas needing some form of control, even ski cutting can produce some pretty powerful slides.  Also an increase in the wind speed or change to direction can pretty quickly create hazard in times of no precip at all. At least a handful of times each season we will have to react with a hurry-up offense in order to mitigate and our window of advance notification has already been closed.  The last two springs have also highlighted another less than perfect scenario. We have gotten some nice cool storms with pretty stable snow.  In the interest of opening the terrain quickly and preserving the untracked rather than offering only slide debris we leave it alone.  With the inevitable warm-up to come, and the nature of those great snow-holding cliff bands, we know that at some point we will need to bring it down or it will do so when we least desire. Twice last spring, once we had transitioned to the Thursday-Sunday or even weekend only schedule, we scheduled staff to come in and shake it loose midweek prior to the coming warmer days.  The goal is to bring it down on our terms with the hill closed, hopefully while still mostly cool and helping to keep the curd small and soft rather than large and wet.  Even with advance notice on the signs we had just too many skinners and hikers on the hill to safely do the work.  We paid the resulting price later with nuisance natural slide activity while the area was open.  Don't let the word nuisance mean they are all small, Alpental is pretty steep and those growlers can grow quite large when the surface snowpack is wet and loose.  As anyone would agree, that’s not an acceptable scenario so we continue to search for the most workable solution.  My humble opinion would be a modification to the Utah model.  Their resorts do not allow any uphill travel from the day they begin setup and control until the last day of operations. I instead support the advance designation of “avalanche control zones” and the no hike rule within those zones.  In that way the rest of the public land leased to the ski area under Special Use Permit would continue to allow uphill travel with some other logical safety guidelines and maybe come close to solving the conflict of the control zone hazard.  Hyak would be a good example of where that might work, with the limited hours of operation anyway.  My understanding is that Steven’s Pass has had much the same problem this fall in their area while trying to make the slopes safe for set-up and opening.  This is becoming a fairly hot topic at many western resorts and I sincerely hope we can come to an acceptable solution without having to suffer some tragic accident first.  Thanks for listening, and to all of you in what I consider my extended family of mountain lovers, sincere wishes for a safe season with plentiful powder.     p.s. – Alpental will open tomorrow, we’ll try for Nash ASAP and no rock skis for me!