The NEW Magic Mountain

[ne_skier]

Skied everything open on Saturday, turned out to be fun spring skiing despite the rain. Looks like Magic is planning to defy odds and open again next weekend from mid mountain w/ spring fling festivities (Green Chair flamingo toss, band at T-Bar). Looks like Saturday’s weather could be a bit less rainy than last weekend.

 

[Hastur]

18 summit laps at magic is a full fucking day. hats off.

If I go all day and just take a quick lunch / coffee break I usually max out at around 15 runs.

 

[MG Skier]

Wow ne skier! That is indeed a TON of laps. BRAVO!

 

[Newpylong]

Must be some young legs right there lol.

 

[ThatGuy]

18 laps has gotta be top 1% for Magic. Full day right there, pretty impressive.

 

[KustyTheKlown]

mostly impressive bc the lift is so damn slow. 1500 vert x 18 runs = 27000 vert. 27000 is a typical day for me at a place with high speed lifts. at magic i tend to get about 15000 because its usually sunday and I'm out of there at 1:30 PM

 

[RustyGroomer]

C'mon guys, his lazy ass spent nearly 4 hours simply sitting on the chair!



J/k Impressive feat.

 

[ne_skier]

I typically got in around 15ish runs skiing the whole day with a quick lunch break this season. Expecting that to go up once the Black lift is in working order and lift lines are very much diminished. My usual routine is one or two groomers in the morning followed by ungroomed till 4, granted there's natural snow.

 

[MG Skier]

I typically got in around 15ish runs skiing the whole day with a quick lunch break this season. Expecting that to go up once the Black lift is in working order and lift lines are very much diminished. My usual routine is one or two groomers in the morning followed by ungroomed till 4, granted there's natural snow.

I don't have those legs either!

 

[ne_skier]

Today's Alpine Update with regards to summer projects on the lift and snowmaking fronts:
- Complete the Quad Summit Lift, finally! This lift doubles our lift capacity for almost zero lift lines and adds redundancy to the top if one lift needed to be taken out of service for a bit. We all know how important that can be! Pfister has already been working on the newly manufactured lift parts since early March and has installed new sheave assemblies on Towers 4, 5, and 11. Four more towers will get new sheaves per the engineering re-design (Towers 6, 7, 8, 18) and Tower 13 gets a tower arm adjustment. All done by Pfister's crew this spring.
- Complete the new handle tow lift install in the expanded beginner area with surface re-grading.
- Expand the snowmaking pond with new dam (doubling its water volume for snowmaking) and create state-required continuous stream flow around the pond to enhance the nearby river tributary system.
- New larger volume pipe replacement from pond to pumphouse to gain significant snowmaking efficiencies
- New snowmaking pipe replacement in critical areas with repetitive ruptures due to old pipe (this will be ongoing upgrades over subsequent years as well)
- Connect pump at Thompsonburg Brook for snowmaking pond water replenishment.

 

[Newpylong]

For some reason I thought the River pump was already online as they rebuilt the motor and put in a VFD as I recall when they did the same in the main pumphouse a few years back. Guess not...

 

[slatham]

For some reason I thought the River pump was already online as they rebuilt the motor and put in a VFD as I recall when they did the same in the main pumphouse a few years back. Guess not...

I thought so too. I know they did a lot of work with intake area, pump house and pump. Could be it needs to be “re” connected due to pond work.

Very curious about the increased pipe capacity from pond to main pump house. I presume this would allow 300 and 400 line to run full out simultaneously. Or is there added capacity for future improvements up the hill?

Do Work, you out there?

 

[Newpylong]

Bigger the better, especially of they ever want to add pump capacity. Right now IMHO it's about half of what a hill with that much snowmaking acreage should be able to pump.

 

[JoeB-Z]

Any idea why so much on hill piping was built out way back without enough supporting infrastructure down below? Was some of that lost in the dark ages?

 

[IceEidolon]

Was it the River pump or the Pond pump that got the upgrades a while back?

I believe they're not too far from running both 300 and 400 wide open simultaneously, but they clearly hit bottlenecks both in pond capacity and in water to the hill - though at different points in the season. Hopefully a 2" or more increase in supply pipe diameter means a future third main mountain pump is in the cards.

 

[ss20]

Any idea why so much on hill piping was built out way back without enough supporting infrastructure down below? Was some of that lost in the dark ages?

Air was always the limiting factor til 15 years ago

 

[Newpylong]

All 3 pumps (pond plus main) were rebuilt and given VFDs.

Magic, like Wildcat, was built out with far more snowmaking acreage than they could conceivably cover in any given season. They keep repairing pipe and adding terrain, but something else always needs to give to cover it. They also do not make snow on Middle Wizard, and Mystery has yet to be restored, both of which would add even more.

A few years back when I was doing the calculations for adding a new pump for us I did the coverage calculations for Magic and they'd need to move up from whatever they are at now (1200 GPM or so) to closer to 3,000 GPM to be able to cover it all from mid November to mid January. That's a typical cost effective snowmaking season. We all know Magic usually keeps going well into February to get the last terrain they want. They ideally would need to add a booster station or greatly increase discharge pressure at the main house to get good pressure and volume higher up.

This is obviously not to discredit the work done whatsoever, just adding some data to the topic.

Does anyone know the drop from the pond to the pumphouse? That makes all the difference in the world if you are gravity feeding your wet pits.

 

[IceEidolon]

I was under the impression that the pond feed enters the pumphouse at ~150psi. What wet pit pumps are we talking about?

If they can stop running out of water in the middle of cold snaps they'll probably get Middle Wizard (There's some older HKD towers there and Impulse sleds can cover the bottom half, it just needs two cold days from top of Sorcerer with big air and two more with the Impulse fleet) just from not losing a week plus of prime snowmaking in January.

Do you think Mystery gets brought back before Witch runs? What'd be your strategy to balance between air hogs up near the summit versus low E sleds down low?

 

[IceEidolon]

Air was always the limiting factor til 15 years ago

Even now and even with the new electric compressors, in marginal air's still the limiting factor. Unless you somehow get 50 Impulses started in marginal temps (~750 GPM using all 5000 CFM). With any reasonable setup there'll be at least a couple Ratniks running, and that'll really cut your GPM. Once it gets cold enough to throw valves, especially Valve 3 where the Impulse goes from 100 to 20 CFM, then they're definitely short on water.

 

[ss20]

Air was always the limiting factor til 15 years ago

I'm sorry I thought I was in the Sunday River thread when I posted this.