F Vail

[Brownski]

Should be in a separate thread
TMI ?

I’m in. Let’s call it “shit piss puke reports”

 

[Sbob]

I’m in. Let’s call it “shit piss puke reports”

I have a high school Mount St Anne trip that covers all three LOL?

 

[Brownski]

I have a high school Mount St Anne trip that covers all three LOL?

I’ll bet you’re not the only one

 

[tirolski]

Stevens Pass had to evacuate lifts on the 5th and not open today
Another lift had "COVID exclusions" and didn’t run.
The road up is closed now so the shitshow has stopped for a bit.

Somebody made an artful cartoon to describe Stevens' shitshow situation.

Stevens Pass skiers snowed

A Change.org petition says Vail Resorts has oversold Stevens Pass season passes and is failing to honor the promises made in the marketing of those passes.

www.seattletimes.com

 

[witch hobble]

Maybe it’s because I only started paying attention to the Northeast Skiology page this year, but it seems like a page for fiddling as Rome burns……or posting pics and stories of the ski industry circling the drain.

It’s like non-stop “this storm is going to miss you”, “look at what Vail did now”, “look at these lift lines!”, “watch this ski area’s deferred maintenance and/or poor management put people in the hospital!”

 

[Adirondack Johnny]

Maybe it’s because I only started paying attention to the Northeast Skiology page this year, but it seems like a page for fiddling as Rome burns……or posting pics and stories of the ski industry circling the drain.

It’s like non-stop “this storm is going to miss you”, “look at what Vail did now”, “look at these lift lines!”, “watch this ski area’s deferred maintenance and/or poor management put people in the hospital!”

Like this?

 

[witch hobble]

Like this?

Exactly like that.

 

[raisingarizona]

Social media for the skiing Karen.

 

[tirolski]

Wildcat had a chair fall off yesterday. Dude went to hospital. Fuck Vail.

Chair Detaches from Wildcat Lift

Photo credit: Mic Murphy A triple chair fell near the base of Wildcat Mountain’s Snowcat lift this afternoon, sending one person to the hospital. The lift involved is a 1974 Riblet servicing …

liftblog.com

 

[TonyC]

It's a fact that skiing used to be a middle class sport. What changed? Sincere question.

Looking at the US as a whole, skiing has never been a middle class sport IMHO. Yes skiing was even more an elitist sport in its formative years, which surely means at least through the 1950's. Which brings to mind the question, "When if ever was skiing not an elitist sport in the US?"

I suspected the answer based upon the data set of Mammoth skier visits, which more than tripled between two excellent (for apples-to-apples comparison) seasons in 1968-69 and 1977-78. FYI Mammoth's skier visits 2015-16 to 2018-19 averaged about the same as in 1977-78.

A cursory Google search led here.

There was approximately a 40 percent increase in participation in skiing in 1979 over 1976, on top of an approximately 40 percent increase between 1973 and 1976. This has brought current participation in this sport of snow skiing to a level of 6.8 percent among individuals, which projects to approximately 14.6 million skiers.

That report is an interesting read, and reminds me of one of the ski guidebooks I bought in 1979.

Collectively as many as 27.1 million people could be skiing in the future.

Rapid growth of western ski terrain slowed in the 1970's, so authors like these predicted overcrowding and capacity limits. The Kottke Report has tracked US skier visits since 1978-79, when it was 50.2 million. Last year was 59.1 million and the record in 2007-08 and 2010-11 was 60.5 million. To no surprise with the advent of high speed lifts, I can tell you that the worst lift lines I've experienced by far were those in the late 1970's.

But what really happened since 1980? The current active skier/snowboarder population is estimated at 9-10 million, 3-4% of the US population. So the percentage of the US population that skis has fallen back to about what it was in 1973. The "popular era of skiing" with consistent growth looks to me to be maybe late 1960's to mid-1980's. US skier visits were flat from the mid-1980's to late 1990's.

All of this tells me that I'm a typical US skier in some ways. My first time was in 1976, right in the middle of that explosive boom period, and age 23 is in a common starting age range too. The people in my age cohort who started as kids were mostly an elite group.

That reference also mentioned that in the 1970's 44% of skier visits were in the Northeast (now it's under 25%). What that tells me is that skiing was much more a local daytrip/weekend sport then. I know that was true when I started out because the financial commitment as a beginner to try skiing back then was quite modest if you weren't traveling and paying for hotels and restaurants. In those late 1970's seasons the proportion of my skiing that was local SoCal daytrip was 48% and the rest was at Mammoth aside from a couple of days at Tahoe. By contrast the SoCal proportion of my skiing from 2011-2019 was 3%.

For you Northeasterners daytrip skiing in the 1970's was even easier than for me because you didn't have to improvise clothing for which you had no need in daily living. In conclusion, skiing was a middle class sport for a small window of time when the baby boomers were in the 16-29 age bracket and even then only in locations within easy daytrip distance of ski areas. I realize these locations apply to 90+% of active members of this forum but not so much to the majority of the US population today.

The convenience factor also plays a supporting role upon skiing being much more of a middle class sport in the Alps. There would be more resistance to the Vail-type model in Europe IMHO.