fcksummer

Warm winter? Come on https://twitter.com/NWSGray/status/1451692301969813506?t=MtI-pxtXV-3udMGYGnWIAQ

Where's the mug club?

I hate this idea. It's a great business decision but it's going to be super frustrating waiting in a long line and watching people skip to the front. Killington Fast Track is "starting" at $49 a day as a daily add-on. Ends up being quite the expensive day when you factor in the regular cost of a ticket.

4.5 @Cannonballer's ranking of a 4 is pretty spot on for me. I give it an extra .5 just because we survived the pandemic without getting shut down like last year. I came in to the year mentally prepared for the season to either have periodic pauses or a full cancellation so at least we were able to avoid all that. Overall, it was a pretty meh season. Hardly any tree days and even the days we had, they didn't seem particularly deep. At Cannon, we had quite a few days were we stayed on the Front 5 between the snowmaking fog, winds & log lift lines. Not hitting any other mountains besides Cannon was a bummer too. It's definitely nice to have some variety. Especially with a long drive, it felt pretty momentous this year. Add that all in together and there were quite a few days where I was terribly inspired. The actual days turned out to be better than expected pretty much all the time but that was mostly due to the low expectations based on the weather. It was a great end to the season however. I wish the terrain was more expansive but it was really nice to have 3 sunny Saturdays in a row and 2 of them with nice warm weather.

Nice. Way to get it. Take some pics for us!

Found this video, haven't had a chance to watch it all but thought you guys might find it interesting. "More Than a Mountain: A Short Film on the Story of Saddleback" https://youtu.be/vB-h9Nrx2Xg

Sorry, forgot to post the link. Here's the full report from them Alterra https://www.alterramtnco.com/news/2021/04/12/alterra-mountain-company-announces-usd207-million-in-transformational.html

Congrats to Loon Mountain for being open the latest in New Hampshire! What the hell happened to Wildcat? Why did they close so early this year? Covid? Vail?

I can't read the article but this came across my phone's news feed. https://www.pressherald.com/2021/04/04/skiers-rave-about-upgrades-atmosphere-in-saddlebacks-first-year-back/ Also saw that its already having a positive impact in the area as far as business, which is great to see. @xwhaleryou were up there last weekend. The pics looked amazing but what did you think about the new management as far as you could tell?

Had a few 70 days at K over the years. Saturday at Cannon was warm too but I didn't get a chance to check the temps in the afternoon.

Squaw Valley is adding a base to base gondola to transport people between Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows. It'll be a 16 minute ride. Steamboat is adding 650 new acres and says it'll be advanced/expert terrain. The rest of the announcements for Deer Valley & Mammoth are base and lodge upgrades.

Adding another fuck yeah. Also a big thanks to everyone who's donated thus far. Agree with @Cannonballerabout working on the content. If we can start to get some new members the site should be self sustaining in short order so hopefully no more fundraisers.

Locking this depressing thread.

That's very generous. I've thrown up a donation link at the top of the forum. If we don't hit the annual goal then I'll return the donations. If we're able to get enough to fund the full year then we'll be able to stay online. Thanks

I just stopped the automatic payments on the forum software. The service expires on 4/21. If anyone wants to take over then please let me know so we can get everything transferred. If not, it's been a fun ride and I'll be sorry to see it go. I'm at Cannon (along with @Puck it @ABV& @Cannonballer) basically every weekend so if anyone ever wants to catch up, shoot me a PM and we can exchange contact info.

It's not really a hassle to keep running, it just doesn't seem worth it financially. Like I mentioned earlier, we've only had a total of 25 unique members make a post this year. If everyone donated, which is highly unlikely then it would be $12 each for the year. I'd only expect like 5 or so people to donate so that number quickly jumps up.

We're short about $300 a year.

Unless we had an outpouring of folks wanting to fundraise and adamant this site survived I wasn't too keen on fundraising and so far that hasn't been the case. Without a plan forward on how to get more members on here there doesn't seem to be much point to keep going. Like you mentioned, forums are a dying breed. I think it would be possible to grow the site but it would require a ton of work. Basically would need to continue what Weatherman started with the Mountain Guides and continue that level of content creation and energy. Also would need to really work the Social Media angle as well. Like I said before, I don't have the time to do all that and that's not really my skillset anyways. So unless someone wants to volunteer to go down that road then its probably best to just Nelsap this place.

Some ugly looking graphs... Only 25 members have posted since January of this year.

Covid should have helped to be honest. Mountains have been doing great this year with everyone looking for outdoor activities and to not see that interest corelate here was a warning sign. SEO would probably help. I just don't have a whole lot of interest in doing that. I'm not creative or a good enough writer to constantly turn out content. Also, with the lack of member generated content it would probably stick out as kind of spammy. I haven't been on there in a few years but the niche this site filled was that it was reliable and not down all the time. I thought all along when Weatherman started this that he would have to basically put AZ out of business to be successful. Splitting an already smallish community wasn't going to work. This site just didn't pull over and keep enough members at the beginning.

4/8 Update: We've had several very generous offers to help fund the site. I've put up a Donation link at the top to see if we can raise enough to keep going for another year. If we don't hit the target amount then the Donations will be refunded. Thanks to everyone who's offered to help out. ------------------------------------------------ 4/2 Update: I just stopped the automatic payments on the forum software. The service expires on 4/21. If anyone wants to take over then please let me know so we can get everything transferred. If not, it's been a fun ride and I'll be sorry to see it go. I'm at Cannon (along with @Puck it @ABV& @Cannonballer) basically every weekend so if anyone ever wants to catch up, shoot me a PM and we can exchange contact info. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Original Post- It's time to have discussion about the future of this site. It's been a year since I took over and unfortunately there hasn't been much growth in terms of userbase and/or content. I don't mind keeping up with the maintenance side of things but operating it at a loss isn't something I'm really too interested in doing. Weatherman had told me when we were discussing him stepping down that it broke even, but after a year of looking at the numbers, that certainly hasn't been the case. Like I said, I'm willing to volunteer my time to keep it running smoothly but there's other things I'd prefer to spend my money on. There's a couple options to keep the site online. If anyone is willing to take over the ownership role, I'd be happy to transition it over to you. That's probably the easiest solution and I would be happy to continue to handle the administration side of things if you're not familiar with operating a website. Long term for this place to survive this is also the best option as we really need someone dedicated to growing and expanding the community. Another option would be to start offering some sort of donation/crowdfunding system. I'm a little less keen on that as I'd hate to collect money for awhile and then be in the same predicament a few years down the road if that dries up. Looking forward to seeing some feedback from you all. It's a great community here with a great vibe and I'd hate to see it go away but to be perfectly honest, the folks that post here the most are people I have a group text chats with anyways. I had hoped to be able to devote more time to trying to grow the site when I took over but my time has become more limited than I anticipated.

Wind was a factor today. Went from 19 to 20

That was a fascinating documentary. I'm glad I've been off Facebook for years and hardly use any of the other networks. They are definitely convenient tools but the addiction to those sites is really something else.

Disappointing week. The next storm is trending south.