A few new HKDs here and there? I wouldn't consider over 500 new guns a few here and there. They can now max out on water using a fraction of the air that they used to use and air is not a limiting factor anymore. They've also been replacing pipe every year to enable them to get more water to different parts of the mountain instead of being forced to only max water when they spread it around to different areas. For example the new 10" pipe they put in on Spring Fling a couple years ago let's them completely light that trail up with nearly max water going to it from what I've heard.
What more do you think they should be doing to expand their snowmaking infrastructure? If the pond can be dug deeper, then that absolutely should be done. But that doesn't help get more water up the mountain, it only helps them avoid running out of water if the flow in the Mad River is low. To get more water up the mountain means completely replacing the pipe from the pond to the mountain with a larger diameter one. How expensive would that be to dig up and replace over 3 miles of pipe? Are there environmental restrictions that prevent them from drawing more water in the first place or is the pipe the only limiting factor?
Sugarbush has been open into the beginning of May 5 of the past 6 years. Has Stowe ever been open that late? Competing with K for early or late season is simply not financially responsible. K's snowmaking infrastructure was extremely built out many many years ago. Sugarbush will never get to that point nor would I expect them to. K has the late season market cornered and even if SB stayed open into June along with them you simply wouldn't see the people at SB. You're competing for a very limited number of people at that point and the demand simply doesn't warrant much more supply.
They've done substantial lift work in the past few years. We have a new Valley House Quad. HG was pretty much completely rebuilt (from an electrical and mechanical perspective). NRX was completely overhauled. Numerous other lifts had significant amount of mechanical and electrical work done (well beyond normal maintenance). What lifts should they still be replacing? I think with all the recent work over the past few years most of them have quite a bit of life left and spending money to replace lifts for the sake of replacing lifts seems irresponsible.
As for snowmaking, I'll again ask exactly what you think they should do? Pretend they have unlimited money but don't pretend that we can ignore all the environmental or logistical restrictions. What would you envision happening in that scenario? Is there a location they could build a secondary pond closer to the mountain if they wanted to? Please don't take this challenge the wrong way. I'm legitimately interested in what you think can be done. I've seen very noticeable improvements the past few years. Some of those improvements are unfortunately being overshadowed by weather problems or unforeseen issues (such as whatever happened this past week that we are all still speculating about).
In terms of value I still think they offer a great deal. For season passes they are significantly cheaper than Stowe and early purchase pricing on passes was very comparable to K. For my particular age bracket they were actually well over 50% cheaper than K for a season pass (although that just started this year and I think you can thank Stowe for that one with the new pass they started).
I sometimes wonder if you hear more about SB's problems just because more people post about them here. I know there have been times Stowe has had lifts down based on what I saw on their snow report yet nothing was ever said about it here. For SB if a lift is down 5 minutes it seems that everyone here knows about (obviously a slight exaggeration...).
