- A new ownership group takes over Brundage Mountain Resort.
- Commuters in the Vancouver region overwhelmingly support a Burnaby Mountain Gondola.
- The Sea to Sky Gondola team and partners splice together multiple haul rope sections to run cabins off the line, completing cleanup.
- The Ropeway Center at Colorado School of Mines presents a new video series.
- Doppelmayr will build the Yodeler detachable quad at Holiday Valley.
- The Forest Service says yes to two future chairlifts at Lee Canyon.
- Ditto for Sunlight’s East Ridge project.
- With its high speed quad nearing completion, Saddleback is poised to reopen in mid-December.
- Windham Mountain renames the Wheelchair lift Baker in honor of a former ski patroller.
- Arizona Snowbowl publishes a new trail map painted by Kevin Mastin.
- Big Sky’s new map shows Madison is now called Jayhawk.
- The Tampa Bay-St. Petersburg-Clearwater region will spend six figures to study gondola transit.
- Without an operator, the only lift in Oklahoma faces an uncertain future.
Lift Blog 
Steamboat also just delayed its opening day from November 21st to December 1st because they want more acreage to spread everyone out. Wonder if other places will do this also.
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Solitude and Killington have also announced similar. The lack of cold temps/snow is not helping anything right now.
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Vermont overview as of now:
Stratton also made an announcement saying it was unlikely they would open on their anticipated date of November 25th, so they join Mount Snow and Killington in the TBD based on weather club. Okemo has not announced a pushback from their November 21st date, but it looks to have been removed from their website as far as I can tell. Bromley has not said anything yet, and they are currently projecting November 27th, but I am not sure if they will make it if Stratton is unsure about November 25th.
The weather looks good for snowmaking the rest of this week, but it will be a bit warm this weekend into early next week before it gets back to snowmaking weather again (hopefully for good).
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Last I checked Magic’s calling 12/7, possible pushback to 12/12. I guess they have enough snowmaking capacity to open up some groomers in Sunshine Corner, the expert terrain is just a matter of waiting for a storm
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Gondola and Christie Express are turning full speed right now. Training I’m guessing.
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Strange that Windham chose their most useless lift to rename after that ski patroller, guess they didn’t want to change anything too much. Now it’s just a matter of guessing how long until they just remove that lift.
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I’m sorry if you’ve answered this before Peter, but why does Jackson always open on Thanksgiving and close the first week of April? Is it the forest service contract or a business decision?
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Business decision.
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https://kdvr.com/news/local/colorado-ski-communities-send-out-sos-to-stop-spread-of-covid/
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Any idea why Big Sky changed the lift name from Madison to Jayhawk? Both seem pretty innocuous.
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Crystal just announced the implementation of a reservation system. I would not be surprised if a few other Alterra resorts with historical capacity constraints, particularly Stratton, Steamboat, Squaw, Solitude, and Winter Park, joined them.
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These reservation systems (along with a bunch of the other mitigation measures) strike me as primarily being a “we gotta cover our asses in case we get sued” type thing (of course, ski areas already had to deal with other kinds of lawyers, like the ambulance chasers advertising on those billboards I remember seeing on I-70 many years ago)
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Steamboat already has a reservation system so if you do not have a season pass you have to make a reservation.
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Bit scummy but while I’d be disappointed, I wouldn’t be surprised.
I completely agree with Reif that this is a “please don’t sue us lol” thing rather than an actual precaution. If they actually cared at all about COVID safety, they’d close all dining, but instead, they’ll just shaft the season pass-holders for profit.
I’ve been saying this since March, but having everybody sacrifice to save a handful of high risk potential COVID patients really isn’t the solution. Let everyone do what they want, and then just don’t be the idiot who skis and sees grandma 4 days later.
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