With today’s wind delays causing some understandable frustration, we thought this would be a good opportunity to share some information about our priorities and our operations.

As we’ve mentioned before, our top priority is and will always be safety. That encompasses both the safety of our guests, but first and foremost, the safety of our team members. Today was an interesting situation as sunny, calm conditions that emerged in the base area did not match up to the conditions we were working with at the summit. Up top, winds continued to gust out of the West (straight up the face of the upper mountain) for several hours while ‘all was calm’ at the base area.

We got 7 inches of fresh snow yesterday, then another 4 inches fell overnight. During the early morning hours of this storm, we saw gusty winds at the same time we experienced a very wet blast of snow (see video below). This time period coated our upper mountain towers, chairs and cables with a thick and persistent coating of rime ice.

Check out this picture of one of the grips on the BlueBird: 

Removing rime ice is nothing new for our team, HOWEVER, we can not begin the process of de-icing until we can begin to move the lifts. We cannot safely move ice-coated lifts when winds are gusting 40-50 mph.

So our process of de-icing simply couldn’t begin until mid-morning. Once it was safe to begin moving the Centennial lift, we had all hands on deck for the de-icing effort. Lift maintenance, lift operations, patrol, and even our General Manager were ‘banging the chairs’ to remove the thick and stubborn rime ice.

While we try to share as much information with our guests as possible, we simply can’t predict exactly how long the de-icing process will take. It’s labor intensive and we have to take it chair by chair until it’s done.

Once we were able to clear and open the Centennial Triple, we moved our team to Lakeview and had that lift open just 30 minutes after Centennial. As you can see in these images and videos, the BlueBird Express got the worst of the rime (look at the carriers – or ‘chairs’ – towers and sheaves in the top photo). That is why we made the decision to open Centennial first, to give our guests access to the upper slopes.

It’s always our goal to open right on time, every day. We understand our guest’s frustration when we do not, and believe us, we do not take it lightly.

We used all the tools at our disposal (multiple emails, text alerts, social media updates) to communicate the status this morning. We encourage our guests to subscribe to more of these tools if you’d like to receive more updates. You can do that quickly at www.brundage.com/media. Again, we share your frustration and we hope this background on today’s efforts helps bring some understanding to the situation.