There were more clouds than I hoped at Snow Ridge, but it was still a spectacular event. The clouds thickened annoyingly after 2. We took the lift up to the summit and walked to a spot at the top of the ridge on the South Slope. For a minute as I was waiting on the platform for my chair up, I thought I might instead be assisting in a lift evac when the safety bar fell off the chair I was about to get on as it went around the wheel in the base house. But they just marked the chair with orange tape, moved the fallen safety bar out of the way, and started it back up. Have to say it was a bit weird running down the ramp at the top getting whacked a bit by the chair. I was also a little concerned when we first arrived and the chair was running off and on at a super low speed while the engine in the base station was making noises like an old car that was never going to stay running. But it did!
We had a nice view toward the sun to the south plus a sweeping view out across the valley to the north and west. We could still see the progress of the eclipse through the clouds with the eclipse glasses. And once I thought totality was just going to be the shadow, but no ring, the ring was there, the darkness was amazing and the experience was almost as good as the clearer day in Grand Island in 2017. It was awesome to go from people being underwhelmed and kind of disappointed even seconds before totality to blown away by the spectacle. We had a solid 3+ minutes with a good view of the ring around the sun despite the cloud cover. The first light coming around the moon at the end of totality was also almost shocking.
There were no chair rides down, so we took our time walking down the South Slope and got to walk through the few patches of remaining snow. Another highlight was watching someone slide down one of the snow patches on his back, and when a few of us applauded he yelled up "I'm just a 74-year-old kid". Both the ride up and walk down also gave a good perspective on just how damaging the tornado was. I didn't make it up to Snow Ridge to ski this season so it was my first time seeing it.
Snow Ridge did a nice job with the event, other than some confusion in the tavern about how to order and orders getting lost. It was great to have a spot to park with food and rest rooms run by the great people at Snow Ridge and surrounded by a nice crowd of friendly and happy people. The chair ride was a nice bonus and gave us a fantastic view with the daylight off in the distance across the panoramic view while it was so dark where we stood. I don't know how many people they had but it was a nice crowd and the parking lot was pretty full.
I'm very happy with where we chose to "get in the shadow" this time, and consider us fortunate to have experienced the show we did despite the clouds rolling in at a pretty unfortunate time.