Powder Ridge, C.T 1/02/2006 - never going back again

[loafer89]

Date Skied: January 2nd, 2006

Area Skied: Powder Ridge

Surface Conditions: Loose Granular, thin spots

Our original plan for today was to take a day trip to Mount Snow, but we decided against it because of the forecasted bad weather that we would encounter on the trip home.

My family decided to sleep late and take a trip to nearby Powder Ridge. The trail report was saying that there were two summit trails open, similar to my experience there last year on January 1st, 2005.

We arrived at the area at 11:00am to quite a crowd of people, We noticed immediately that the summit triple chair was not operating, and with good reason, there were no chairs attatched to the cable .

While eating an early lunch we had crackers land on our table (one hit my son in the face) from the group of kids having a food fight nearby and no adults with them.

I purchased a lift ticket for myself for $37, and my son skied for free, not a bad deal or so we thought.
Since the summit triple was not running, the summit was serviced by an ancient Hall double chair with a lift line that needed it's own zipcode.

Our first run was down Upper and Lower Middlefield which had nice soft snow and snowmaking whales to make things fun. We endured a 20 minute liftline wait for another run down the same trail.

By this time the lifty had a good idea to open a singles line, not a bad idea, but not a good one either when you already had two individual lines servicing a DOUBLE CHAIR. I have never seen a lift line decend into chaos, now there were groups of THREE people waiting in line in the SINGLES maze plus there were people forming a singles line next to the single maze, yes ladies and gentlemen, four distinct lift lines for a double chair, deep breath.

We waited for over 35 minutes for another run down the terrain park which had really thin cover. Not wanting to grow old on a lift line we decided to leave and go to Mount Southington 14 miles away. My wife was nice enough to drive us there with our ski boots on, which made things alot easier.

[Bob R]

Food fight. Funnier on TV.

[bvibert]

Sorry to hear about your bad experience. To be fair to the mountain, they really have no control over parents leaving their kids unattended in the lodge... They should have had better control over the lift lines though...

[loafer89]

They had absolutely no liftline control at all, it was a free for all. We were so frustrated that we left rather than wait in an endless line for which the skiing was barely worth it.

As for the food fight, my wife was furious and started yelling at the kids, and recieved a very hushed "sorry"