A real winter storm

We have a real storm on our hands here! Current storm conditions, including consistent gusts between 60 and 100mph all day, had most of our lifts on windhold. With today’s conditions, and the current forecast, we anticipate that we will have some late openings at both mountains tomorrow.  

Here’s what we’ve been doing today to try to open as close to 9am tomorrow as possible:

• We’ve got our lift mechanics going around to key lifts and running them throughout the day even though they aren’t open for skiing. We do this to keep the ice from building up. If the ice builds up our crews have to climb each tower and knock the ice off by hand and they have to do the same for all of the chairs. And this is a time consuming project, so we try to avoid it when we can.
• Performing snow safety where and when we can throughout the day to make it go more quickly tomorrow. Today we had to close KT22 due to unstable snow conditions.  Extreme winds are making it difficult to keep up on this.
• Re-building and maintaining our on-mountain roads. Without these roads we can’t get our patrollers to the areas where they need to perform snow safety. We work on these roads day and night so that we can do our control work as soon as it is light (state law requires we have visibility to use our hand held explosives). Sometimes Mother Nature has other ideas about where and when we can work, though, and we aren’t able to do this. Today our ability to maintain these roads has been limited, but we are still working where we can.

What tomorrow looks like:
–    At Squaw Valley we anticipate starting the day with KT east. The skiing should be good and fun. 
–    At Alpine Meadows we anticipate having most of our lifts open by 9am, though we may see a few late openings depending on what the wind and temperatures do this evening.

We know all his new snow has everyone excited and ready to ski. We have all measures in place to open safely and as quickly as possible, but we still expect delays. So please get your real time information from our app and lift and trails status page.