Finally got to Magic for a few runs on New Years Day, including a couple with JM. Wow they were so close to having some solid skiing over the holidays. The late sale - the last affect of the previous knucklehead regime - hurt for sure. But even with all that they offered some good, challenging, old school variable skiing with the most honest snow report around. Show Off was simply prestine, deep base and edge to edge carvable groomed skiing. If they had a couple more days the upper mountain would have been the same. As it was they did a good job connecting Upper Carpet to Medium and Up Your Sleeve, both of which had leftover powder shots plus the overnight 1-2" blown in (lower UYS was actually really sweet by any standard). Lower Carpet was groomed natural, thin but very skiable. Vertigo had shots to skiers left. Kinderspiel was also very nice and skied like a typical mid winter day.
Trick was trickier, as the snow that was made was variable up top, though still skiable and skill enhancing. Lower Trick had been groomed and skied very well if thin in spots. The section of Wand connecting to Show Off was in mid season form.
Per Dave, Red is "purring like a kitten" and certainly felt smooth to me. Apparently Black is close to being load tested, and the beginner handle tow was back running with several customers.
As for snowmaking, there were new HKD's everywhere- land guns and portable towers scattered about, with tower guns on Trick, Magic Carpet and Medium (and off in the distance on Tali). A couple of Ratniks too for good measure. According to JM they just got a 3rd leased compressor, so I would expect some serious snowmaking later this week when true arctic air returns.
Overall, the 'statistics' of skier visits and open terrain etc vastly underestimate the amount of progress. And I haven't even mentioned BLT....
If there's a picture here it's Up Your Sleeve.....
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UYS looks great and I can't wait to get up there in February! Would love earlier but we have a couple weekends planned and then our week in Bartlett end of January.
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