Snow Valley
Snow Valley, Calif., has added another attraction to the many options in their 20,000-square-foot skate park. The $20,000 Clover Leaf Bowl is similar to an above-ground pool divided into three segments of different depths—five feet, six and a half feet and eight feet deep. The bowl is built out of pressure-treated wood lined with 12-gauge steel and is surrounded by an eight-foot deck. The skate park is a year-round attraction thanks to Southern California weather—when it snows they just shovel it off and keep on skating. Building on the success of the skate park, management is introducing concerts and summer skate camps this year and plans to add a MountainBoard course this summer that will double as a BMX raceway. MountainBoards—resembling small snowboards on tires—will join skateboards and inline skates in the rental shop with the requisite helmets and pads.
Holiday Valley
Holiday Valley, N.Y., is undergoing a $3.7 million expansion this summer, mostly in the form of a $2.7 million customer service center adjacent to the main base lodge. The 23,500-square-foot building will house customer service and administrative offices as well as 12 new ticket windows. The rental shop will be expanded—doubling in size—and will connect the base lodge to the new building underneath an open-air plaza. On the slopes, snowmaking improvements are in the works for the halfpipe and snowboard park with the installation of 25 HKD tower guns along with hydrants and air/water lines. The resort’s golf course didn’t escape unscathed, either. In order to maintain a safe distance from the new customer service center, the 18th green had to be relocated, creating a slight dogleg to the west.
Jackson Hole
No facet of the resort is left out of the $14 million of on-mountain improvements this summer at Jackson Hole, Wyo. The new eight-passenger Bridger Gondola from Poma will travel 8,600 feet in 7.5 minutes from the base of Teton Village to the Headwall, giving the gondola a capacity of 2,000 pph. The 66 CWA cabins will be the first X-style cabins in the U.S., designed with more glass for greater visibility. Before a 1987 building was demolished to make way for the gondola terminal, residents were invited to recycle its contents, all the way down to lighting fixtures and ceiling tiles. Replacing the old building will be a new 17,000-square-foot Mountain Plaza to house the Kid’s Ranch, rental, ticketing and ski school facilities. On the snowmaking side, 18,000 feet of air/water line from Sno-Star pipelines will be installed in an expansion designed by SMI.
Mammoth Mountain
A new restaurant, lifts, ticketing programs, lifts, lodge renovations … did I mention lifts? All are included in the $17 million to be spent in the first summer of the five-year, $80 million expansion at Mammoth Mountain, Calif. Lift construction is being done in-house with the help of some unusual equipment: a modified D5 cat dozer with a crane—originally used on the Alaskan pipeline—was used to remove five lifts over snow, which will be replaced by three Doppelmayr detachable quads. Chair #6 and the T-bar next to the main lodge will be replaced with a 2,500-foot-long detachable with a vertical rise of 600 feet. The detachable replacing Chair #2, a fixed-grip quad, will be longer, extending 4,500 feet, with 1,080 feet of vertical and a capacity of 2,800 pph. Chair #3, a popular 1960 Riblet double complete with center pole, will be replaced by the third detachable quad, 3,000 feet long with a capacity of 2,000 pph. Chair #5, originally a Yan double, will be converted to a triple using Yan components.
Chestnut Mountain
Preliminary grading for the new 27,000-square-foot Village Ski Center at Chestnut Mountain, IIl., temporarily came to a halt when a machine operator unearthed a long-forgotten, reinforced concrete pad—the top terminal footing of a lift demolished nearly 20 years ago. It was too near to the hotel to blast, so excavators rigged with hydraulic hammers were used to break it up before construction could resume on the future home of Chestnut’s ticketing, rental, retail, ski school and first aid center. Chestnut’s $1.5 million expansion this summer also includes an eight-acre terrain park for skiers and snowboarders, serviced by a 900-foot Heron Poma triple chair, taken down two years ago, that will be reengineered with a new drive system and reinstalled.
Camelback
It would take five miles of two-car garages filled with dirt and laid end-to-end to hold the 200,000 cubic yards of dirt being moved for the new trail at Camelback, Penn. After all the cutting and filling is done on the 100-foot-wide trail, the original 60-percent pitch will range from 18 percent on the turns to 22 percent on the straights. The new trail will be serviced by the Stevenson Express detachable quad with 14 chairs added to handle the extra traffic, increasing the lift’s capacity from 1800 pph to 2400 pph. The rest of this summer’s $1.5 million investment goes towards 12,000 feet of air/water line and 65 Avalanche-7 guns, which will bring snowmaking coverage on the new trail to 100 percent.
