Happy Thanksgiving

Early this Thanksgiving morning our snowmakers were out on the hill starting up snowguns at Black River Basin. It was a team effort by our swing and graveyard shifts to fire up the pumps, charge the lines, and fire the guns. Within a few hours, we were making snow on Lower Maiden Voyage, Sailor's Delight, and the Oxbow headwall. Our first priority will be Sailor's Delight from the top of Ascender all the way down to the bottom. Once we're feeling confident there, we'll work our way down Oxbow and Upper Maiden Voyage.  

The forecast for the next week is looking quite good for making snow. Our friends at OpenSnow have started providing us with wet bulb forecasts, which has really cut down on the amount of mental math I'm doing to account for humidity when looking at regular forecasting models. The map below shows the forecast through next Tuesday, as you can see we should be able to run straight through until then with optimal temperatures nearly the entire time. While OpenSnow may be new to the world of wetbulbs, their snow forcasting is the best in the business. Check this link for a free 60 day trial and know where the best snow is this holiday season.

Thankfully, Mother Nature has provided the temps we need, now it's a matter of pushing our systems as far as we can to make as much snow as possible in the next seven days. I'm thankful for our hardworking crew and am looking forward to seeing the product of their efforts. Keep an eye on our live cams and stay tuned to our channels for an opening day announcement and be sure to thank a snowmaker!

Some of my fondest childhood memories are of driving with my Dad and his friends down to Madison to watch each year's new Warren Miller film. It always signaled the start of winter and caused my stoke to become somewhat unbearable in the following days spent watching snow fall through the classroom window. Fortunately, I now get to watch the snow fall from my office window and see the Warren Miller film right here in Ironwood. The Historic Ironwood Theatre will be showing Warren Miller's: All Time this Saturday at 7pm as part of a fundraiser for Team Z, the local racing program. Check out the trailer below and if it convinces you to go check out the film, you might even be the lucky winner of a Snowriver Season Pass, one of many prizes to be given away during the intermission. I hope to see you there!

This was a big week for our Lift Project team. On Monday the 20th, after a weekend full of unloaded tests, the Doppelmayr engineers signaled it was time to load up the lift for its acceptance test. The acceptance test, often referred to as the "load test" or "dynamic test" is a procedure by which each chair on the lift is loaded with 110% of the designed weight capacity and put through its paces. Water is the easiest, heavy thing to move around, so that's the common medium for performing these tests. 

Our team loaded up 6 cardboard boxes onto each chair and filled them up to a calculated level to ensure an accurate load was put onto each chair. Once all the chairs on the uphill side of the lift were filled, the engineers began their tests. Those include the obvious, making sure the electric motor and evacuation drives will move the lift under the heavy load, but their series of tests are also designed to test all of the redundant systems to ensure they each function on their own. For example, the lift has 4 different brakes, all of which are tested independently to ensure they can stop the lift and hold the load without needing assistance from any of the others. While these brakes would typically work together under normal operating conditions, seeing them each do the job on their own sure is reassuring. 

After a full day of testing, the lift successfully passed all of them, marking the official completion of our biggest project of the summer! Once all the boxes were emptied and unloaded, I joined our mountain manager and a few others from the project team on the first ride. It was quite the feeling to fly up the mountain in near silence, the 6 of us in awe of the work that we've been able to accomplish in the last 8 months.

The team and I truly can't wait for you all to experience this awesome new experience on the Voyageur Express, opening December 15th, 2023. 

-Benjamin