IN THE DEEP

A birthday hike around the Vista Trail

We finally paid our favorite ski hill a visit yesterday and found progress steaming ahead! The new Four Points chalet, visible from the base but even more so from the top of Thunderhead, is looking like a castle atop that second knoll to the peak.

My reaction: no wonder they got such low marks this year on sustainability, that's a freaking monstrosity. But it'll service our visitors exponentially more than its outdated predecessor. Craig's reaction: You're going to have to ski all the way around that thing to get to Twister!  Funny how two people see something entirely different.

Four Points is starting to look like a million dollar home on the hill

In other news, they dropping additional serious cash on capital improvements this season.  Dozens of new pipes are going into the Daze snowmaking system; stacks of them were laid all over the slope under the gondola awaiting their trenches to be dug. Gaping trenches remain in the saddle with the old pipes already  removed and looking far more than just "dated." We speculated that they may have been original material, but who knows - if there were any press releases on this in the Steamboat Media Room, we'd know more... but we didn't see any at first glance.

Rows of shiny new snowmaking pipes lined the Heavenly Daze

Last piece of note were the new bike racks. 20 of them, at $5000 each spells more money invested for SSRC. They look sharp, and surely they make life much easier on the staff. Of course, we sure would have liked to see a second accessible car worked into that budget. Currently the wait for the single car wide enough for a wheelchair is over 20 minutes if you "just miss it," like we did today. Those run $30,000 and it's been 8 years since that first one went in.

20 shiny new bike racks added to the line

In their defense, economically the cyclists are bringing in more money to Steamboat than wheelchair users do... or do they...?  Access Anything's numbers beg to differ that the potential is there - 55 million Americans spending $13.6 billion annually on travel and every wheelchair user travels with a 3-6 person entourage. We were up there for about 90 minutes yesterday and saw a total of 6 other wheelchair users - all dining on the hill. Were the cyclists? Nope.
I rest my case.

Let the countdown begin: 40 days until the tent sale and 129 til the slopes open. That leaves us some time to enjoy the hill in green - ashamed we haven't been up sooner, but we have several more visits to the playground in the next month... some hiking and biking to come, so it'll be quite a while before we "see you in the deep" yet again!