 Poster: A snowHead
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Winterhighland, the majority of people you see in resort, particularly during peak season, are tourists not skiers. They like lots of piste, long lunches and not much challenge.
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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Lizzard, So if L2A designated a couple of lifts as a Zone Freeride with avy control but limited pisting (perhaps a catrack where necessary to return people to the lift) it would be under used?
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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STOP THE BRUTAL GROOMING 
May they rust is peace 
The Big Comb-Over
Risk-averse baby boomers demand well-groomed slopes that won’t jar their
knees and backs. Resorts pamper them, but not without alienating some
skiers and snowboarders who abhor the blandness of safe snow.
By Hannah Nordhaus
Special to The LA Times
November 2, 2004
Before he can comb snow, Elliot Halverson must learn to push mud.
It's early in the fall semester, and the Colorado Mountain College
freshman sits atop an idling bulldozer in Iowa Gulch, up a long unpaved
road from a valley of shuttered silver mines. Halverson studies a
pickup-wide hole in the clearing that today serves as his school lab,
puzzling over how to fill it.
He hesitates, then drives a bladeful of dirt into the pit. One dozer
track spins briefly, spitting rocks and clods of clay into the aspens,
but then grips the earth and emerges on the other side, hole filled.
Later, his ski-ops professor offers encouragement: "What you were doing
was good, track-packing that section."
While Halverson, a mop-topped 20-year-old in a high school ski team
sweatshirt, practices with dirt, he dreams of landing a job as a Sno-Cat
driver and distributing actual "product" — snow — on a mountain. Some
may think it sacrilege to label snow as a commodity, but in the
high-stakes grab for demographically desirable skiers and snowboarders,
slope grooming sells lift tickets.
To seduce the well-heeled masses, resort strategists increasingly order
crews of seasoned Elliot Halversons to deliver a product they call
corduroy. On more and more slopes Sno-Cat drivers smooth away any
wrinkles or blemishes that might scare their best customers: jetloads of
risk-averse baby boomers. This trend — what some detractors refer to as
brutal grooming — is destroying a once revered '80s icon, the mogul.
Will anyone stick around to stop the brutality?
"It used to be blasphemous to say that you didn't like skiing bumps, but
today it's OK to look down your nose at moguls," says Mike Kessler,
executive editor of Skiing magazine. "There's definitely been a shift
away from bump skiing and that whole hot-dogging mentality into the
big-mountain, big-powder, free-ride realm."
Navigating a field of moguls requires speed, superhuman quads and the
bones and cartilage to withstand knee-jarring, lower-back-compressing
drops from mini-hill to valley. Moguls can dislodge skis, throwing heels
over heads and poles, hats and goggles flying.
"I won't take a whole mogul run, no way," says Betty Schlackman,
president of the Dallas Ski Club. "For my level of skiing, intermediate,
if I'm going to do a black [diamond], it's got to be groomed."
A problem with nature
It used to be that skiers got what nature offered, and the appearance of
a mogul — a mound that forms wherever skiers turn repeatedly — was
accepted as part of the experience.
Then, in 1951, Steve Bradley, mountain manager for the Winter Park ski
area near Denver, began looking for a way to reduce moguls and keep snow
on the trails. He came up with the Bradley Packer, a 5-foot-wide
corrugated culvert that a skier would drag downhill, flattening the snow
in his wake while trying to evade the spinning rotor.
"It was a pretty scary thing," says Ron Richards, maintenance supervisor
at Winter Park.
The first Sno-Cat, a tracked vehicle that towed a 20-foot-wide culvert —
a sort of bumpy pipe — went into operation a decade later. Though
grooming technology steadily improved, it wasn't until the mid-1980s
that manufacturers added blades to push snow back uphill and tillers to
comb the hard pack into the silky corduroy that many skiers now expect.
Around the same time, pivoting winch technology made it possible for the
machines to groom uphill on steeper terrain.
"You see places groomed today that never would have been groomed 20
years ago," says Michael Berry, president of the National Ski Areas
Assn. "Everybody's kind of exploring what's the next steepest thing that
they can groom."
That's because grooming is a marketing tool as much as it is a
snow-moving tool: "Hail to the Sno-Cat kings … and the most groomed
terrain on the planet," reads a Vail print ad appearing this year in ski
magazines.
This year, the Colorado resort increased its overall grooming by 33%. It
runs 24 Sno-Cats over two shifts, covering more than 1,000 of its 5,000
acres every night, with three hours of downtime so mechanics can service
the vehicles. Breckenridge boasts that it grooms all beginner and
intermediate slopes daily. Beaver Creek doubles its grooming passes and
pampers its slopes with lunchtime touch-ups. The luxury Colorado ski
area has also instituted guest services such as e-mailing maps to hotels
that point out the day's corduroy.
Grooming strategies vary from day to day. Areas that draw urban-close
crowds comb more slopes on weekends to disperse the intermediate skiers
across the mountain. Some resorts divvy the snowscape within a single
run, retaining the moguls on one side so some skiers can loosen their
fillings on bumps while their companions coast on the smooth.
Avid skiers notice and appreciate quality slope workmanship.
"It's great to see a precise job done by the Cat driver," says Dave
Welz, from Durango, Colo. "Sudden variations in blade depth or sloppy
transitions from one [grooming] pass to the next can make a mess of the
corduroy. A lot of experienced slope groomers out there are artists with
their machines."
But some skiers and boarders have begged the ski areas to cut back on
the corduroy. Intensive grooming robs the sport of its uncertainty, they
say, and homogenizes the varied surfaces on which they might broaden
their skills.
Winter Park — a mecca for bumpers — stopped grooming Drunken Frenchman,
one of its signature mogul runs, after receiving a raft of complaints
three years ago. And after Steamboat Springs acquired a winch Cat in the
late 1980s and flattened a number of popular bump spots, one disgruntled
local printed a batch of bumper stickers: "Stop the Brutal Grooming."
"I just couldn't understand why they'd brutally groom our best bump runs
and turn them into inclined parking lots," says Mike Farrell, who sold
thousands of decals, hats and T-shirts with the admonishment. "They did
it just so they could give access to people who don't have the ability
to ski that run."
Boomers rule
If anything, however, the industry is moving toward more brutal
grooming, and with good reason: Out-of-town visitors — who bring in
out-of-town money — demand it. Aging baby boomers still dominate ticket
sales, and while a new generation of wider skis has kept them riding the
high-speed lifts later in life, many admit they lack the desire and
stamina to carve up a steep mogul field.
"There's not enough Nuprin that I can take in the course of the day to
keep me going in the bumps," says ski association president Berry.
And there's probably not enough Celebrex to keep him in the terrain
parks, either. The skateboarding spinoffs that have siphoned some
would-be hot-doggers off mogul runs are now a commodity in their own
right, particularly in Southern California. Besides making snowboarders
and twin-tippers happy, they "capture" younger, rowdier riders in a
relatively small space. These playpens leave other guests unmolested,
and that suits trail managers just fine.
"We don't want 500 snowboarding kids out in the middle of our ski school
product, and they don't want to be there," says Jimmy Roberts, vice
president of mountain operations at Beaver Creek.
The larger resorts now devote about 20% of their snowmaking and grooming
resources to terrain parks. But ski areas close to a big snowboarding
subculture, such as Southern California's Bear Mountain and Snow Summit,
have invested much more heavily in half-pipes and terrain parks littered
with fun boxes and rails.
There's even an advanced degree of sorts for groomers who specialize in
terrain parks and drive Pipe Monsters and Park Bullies. They attend
"Cutters Camps" — a ski-ops graduate program of sorts — to learn how to
sculpt takeoff angles, landing zones and "progressions" that accommodate
all levels of riders.
The goal, resort marketing strategists say, is to keep the product
interesting. "We don't just stamp the mountain with a package and say
that's it," says Gary Mays, trail director at Colorado's Breckenridge.
"We try to change it throughout the year and offer diversity."
A future in grooming
Back in Iowa Gulch, Halverson and his overwhelmingly male classmates
leave the dozer and scatter.
Soon their heavy-machinery lab (the class's core text: "Power Trains" by
John Deere & Co.) will move from CMC's Timberline campus to even higher
country at Ski Cooper, a county-owned area with 26 trails over 400 acres.
By this time next year, with coursework done, they will start their
"co-op," a four-month paid position that, with the college's 95% job
placement rate, often leads to a postgrad fantasy life.
Vail grooming foreman Todd Rudis, a 1992 CMC graduate, says that after
17 years rolling up and down the mountain, he still gets a thrill out of
the view from a Sno-Cat. "I love being out there at night, seeing the
wildlife, the sunsets, and knowing that you're making a difference for
the next day of skiing."
That's what Halverson the quiet kid pictured back in his hometown of
Keene, N.H., when he spotted an ad in a ski magazine for the CMC
ski-operations program: "I just wanted to drive Sno-Cats and work in a
ski area."
Not to mention ski 90 days a year, play with big toys and build hits in
terrain parks. People get paid for this?
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stanton, fascinating, thank you.
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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| Winterhighland wrote: |
| Lizzard, can't people see the contradiction between wanting immaculate groomed featureless motorways, then wanting a 100km + of trails because doing them more than once is boring! |
Too right. Sometimes doing them even once is too boring. Ever been to the Dolomitisuperski area? thousands of miles of pistes, all groomed flat, all the same gradient, shoot down the dull, long, narrowish tracks with no space (or need) ever to turn and pole a bit. Yawn. Not a mogul in the entire region.
But then standing there in St Anton earlier this month, watching and waiting for them to finish grooming the 12" of new powder on the black above the Naserein before they would open the handful of lifts...
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Mass missing of point going on here. You lot aren't typical. Resorts cater for the majority, and respond to what their customrs tell them. It's also in their interest to make sure the season lasts as long as possible.
fatbob, there are two unpisted blacks and four itineraires marked on the piste map, all of them good places to be on a heaving busy day in February because there's no-one on them. http://www.les2alpesreservation.com/documents/doc_centrale/Plan_pistes_Hiver_2010-2011_BD.jpg
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I don't think anyone's missing the point. There will always be a big market for unchallenging and one might say characterless, wide motorway groomers. This doesn't mean to say that this is the only thing resorts should provide nor that continued better grooming doesn't also facilitate unhelpful behaviours such as the uncontrolled arseout schusslords calling Mars shortly before thay wipe out themselves and unfortunate others.
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| Lizzard wrote: |
| Mass missing of point going on here. You lot aren't typical. Resorts cater for the majority, and respond to what their customrs tell them. It's also in their interest to make sure the season lasts as long as possible. |
Maybe, but I think some resorts have got it wrong. What we have going on here is Ski Area Marketing Managers turning everywhere into boring homogeneous ski slopes.
Its just like going to towns or Shoppping Malls all over the Western world or boarding a plane in London & getting out in New York, Sydney,Tokyo or Amsterdam everything is the same, it all to easy there is no challenge or adventure !
Ischgl is prime example of building lifts & grooming over everything they could possibly get away with.
I think some areas should keep to there roots as hardcore or difficult where people can challenge themselves.
Skiing is being made so easy it is actually giving a force sense of security or impression to most folks actual capability. This is dangerous IMO.
Bring on the Helmet brigade you made it more dangerous with reckless speed on groomers.!!
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still failing to see the issue, 80% of pistes are pretty boring anyway? go off piste if its such an issue? there's plenty in most places?
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| vik wrote: |
| still failing to see the issue, 80% of pistes are pretty boring anyway? go off piste if its such an issue? there's plenty in most places? |
Plenty of people don't want to deal with the avi risk, and building new pistes/grooming runs that didn't used to be cuts down on the amount of easily accessible offpiste. for example, the new piste in Westendorf down to Brixen ruined one of the best secret powder stashes in the area.
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snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
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And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
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| stanton wrote: |
| smug, anally retentive ski hack with a hankering for the good ol' days that never really happened wrote: |
| It used to be that skiers got what nature offered, and the appearance of a mogul — a mound that forms wherever skiers turn repeatedly — was accepted as part of the experience. |
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smug, anally retentive ski hack with a hankering for the good ol' days that never really happened, but as you are well aware, a mogul is not in fact what nature offers but is instead, a dull, repetitive bi-product of too many skiers using the same bit of snow because that's still less challenging than skiing elsewhere. In reality, slush, powder, sastrugi, ice, rock, cliff bands, neve, avalanche debris, vegetation, blizzards, rain, sleet and wind are what nature really offers. How'd you like them apples ? 
Last edited by And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports. on Tue 31-01-12 16:49; edited 1 time in total
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| Quote: |
I really don't understand why people come into the mountains, with all their fantastic natural features, and still want to just play in a little manmade park though
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But I can understand why people like to use the flattering, well-groomed, pistes of the superski Dolomiti to cruise round one of the most beautiful mountain areas in the world and stop for exceptionally nice lunches.
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You know it makes sense.
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moffatross,
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In reality, slush, powder, sastrugi, ice, rock, cliff bands, neve, avalanche debris, vegetation, blizzards, rain, sleet and wind
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And all in one run on Aviemore  
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Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
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| moffatross wrote: |
| stanton wrote: |
| smug, anally retentive ski hack with a hankering for the good ol' days that never really happened wrote: |
| It used to be that skiers got what nature offered, and the appearance of a mogul — a mound that forms wherever skiers turn repeatedly — was accepted as part of the experience. |
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smug, anally retentive ski hack with a hankering for the good ol' days that never really happened, but as you are well aware, a mogul is not in fact what nature offers but is instead, a dull, repetitive bi-product of too many skiers using the same bit of snow because that's still less challenging than skiing elsewhere. In reality, slush, powder, sastrugi, ice, rock, cliff bands, neve, avalanche debris, vegetation, blizzards, rain, sleet and wind are what nature really offers. How'd you like them apples ? |
That LA Times article was written 8years ago !
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Poster: A snowHead
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
You need to Login to know who's really who.
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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Lizzard, you are the one failing to grasp most of the points here. There are only a few mega resorts in the world and they are distorting the market place and perception of snowsports, while at the same time changing snowsports from a mountain sport that offers people a personal challenge which is rewarding, into a business where the product is massaging (aging?) egos. The majority of ski areas around the world are small, local, day trip or short weekend break type destinations, not large French mega resorts, it is your holidaymaker that is NOT typical.
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Winterhighland, so why are people on here complaining about the big resorts rather than just pushing off to the smaller ones and doing what they apparently want to do?
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I don't know about "round the world", or even round the rest of France, but the small French ski resorts I visit mostly have very well groomed pistes and, being a very old lady, I find they suit me fine, thanks. I have found myself rather disappointed, though, to find some enjoyable dinky jinky bits of runs, which need a bit of thought and finesse, have been smoothed out during the summer with a coup de bull. That's a shame, I think, and reduces the character.
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| Quote: |
no off piste opps in the whole of the 3v? really!?
basically as stated by a couple of people and myself) above, all the anti-grooming people: either get up later, or go off piste
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Why don't you get fit and learn to ski?
I have nothing against most of the runs being groomed, I really like to find a quiet stretch and carve the skis so hard I'm almost scraping my elbows, BUT there should also be at least some runs that are left natural.
I don't ski offpiste very much as I usually ski alone or with family, This year I got out to Val Thorens with UCPA on their offpiste course, EXCELLENT!!!!!!!
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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| Lizzard wrote: |
| Winterhighland, so why are people on here complaining about the big resorts rather than just pushing off to the smaller ones and doing what they apparently want to do? |
Because it's a forum and arguing about trivia is what we do for entertainment when we're not actually close to the snow.
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| fatbob wrote: |
| Lizzard wrote: |
| Winterhighland, so why are people on here complaining about the big resorts rather than just pushing off to the smaller ones and doing what they apparently want to do? |
Because it's a forum and arguing about trivia is what we do for entertainment when we're not actually close to the snow. |
Pretty much!
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snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
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And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
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I once piste bashed a sledging run for my kids in my wife's Renaukt RX4. I'd say it was blue run steepness and the car seemed to tank ut up and down the powder just fine. My wife still doesn't know, neither does the farmer who's field it was.
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| pam w wrote: |
| Quote: |
I really don't understand why people come into the mountains, with all their fantastic natural features, and still want to just play in a little manmade park though
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But I can understand why people like to use the flattering, well-groomed, pistes of the superski Dolomiti to cruise round one of the most beautiful mountain areas in the world and stop for exceptionally nice lunches. |
Quite, and don't forget la bella figura.
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You know it makes sense.
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Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
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The advance of piste bashing goes more or less hand-in-hand with the advance of lift systems.
When you have to walk up the mountain to ski down it you the number of people skiing isn't that high so it takes a lot longer for a run to become a mogel field of death/have not snow at the top because it's all been pushed to the bottom. When you have lifts able to take 3000 people/hr up to the top of the same run it mogles-up a lot quicker and you end up with all the snow at the bottom - at which point the bashers come out and even things out so there's something for people to ski the next day.
| stanton wrote: |
| Ischgl is prime example of building lifts & grooming over everything they could possibly get away with. |
Yea, they should really open some sort of new gondola to specifically open up an unbashed free ride area, maybe up to the top of Piz Vsl Gronda or somewhere... Welcome to 2013.
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Poster: A snowHead
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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I am fortunate enough to have a pioneer of scottish skiing as a customer. I have bent his ear a few times about the formative years, he has told me about creating the first winch tow at Cairngorm. The essence of it all, what I can gather, is the breaking of boundaries and the challenge. It is a bygone time, with larger than life characters. He was up at my yard, just before Christmas, as usual he drove (he is well into his nineties now) he flirted with my OH in the office, and moaned that he had to visit his son down south for Christmas "coz he worried".
Today's skiing is a different sport for a different client base. I will need to jar him up about about piste bashers, as this thread has got me thinking.
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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| Lizzard wrote: |
| Yeah right. Look at the resort clientele - kids, families, old people, holidaymakers, recreational skiers, the odd disabled person. How many of them would actually be into your ski sauvage? ' |
Well, the kids, families and old people in north America are happily skiing into the ski sauvage!
Personally, I quite enjoy occasionally cruising along the well-groomed snowy-motorway from one valley to the next just to have lunch. But I wouldn't put that occasional preference to such height, nor justify it as the only thing kids, families and average skiers are capable of enjoying in the mountains!
Reality is, un-pisted runs are perfectly enjoyable by most, albeit slowly. But that's the whole point, isn't it.
Everybody moans about excessive speed on overly crowded pistes. Yet they demand over-grooming by insisting the average skiing public can't find enjoyment in skiing n-pisted runs slowly. It's not that the public don't enjoy un-pisted runs. It's those mega-resorts over-glorify high speed cruising to showcase their well-groomed piste as a marketing point.
All too sadly, many (including good skiers) actually fall for such marketing ploy! 
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It's not a marketing technique. The choice is between skiing around a decent distance, doing different runs of different difficulty, having a nice lunch then skiing back via a couple of bars. I prefer this to doing a few blues and then destroying my legs on massive mogul fields as do most of the people who spend the money that makes the resorts viable concerns.
I've been down some of these huge mogul fields before and I don't get how they are considered really interesting when you see more of the same scenery and twisting your legs from left to right.
Some ski areas have itineraries because they clearly believe there is a market for people who want ungroomed pistes but they obviously aren't going to make key pistes that attract people to the area ungroomed mogul runs.
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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One of the great things about skiing in North America, NZ etc is the ungroomed in bounds terrain that is avi and hazard controlled where no groomer ever goes. Lots of snow that has only been modified by the weather and the passing of skis and boards. So its easy to get off the groomed and learn to ski in the varied conditions that make skiing so much fun and endlessly challenging.
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| madlondoner wrote: |
| It's not a marketing technique. The choice is between skiing around a decent distance, doing different runs of different difficulty, having a nice lunch then skiing back via a couple of bars. I prefer this to doing a few blues and then destroying my legs on massive mogul fields as do most of the people who spend the money that makes the resorts viable concerns. |
"Some" who believe they represent "most".
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The most popular resorts are the ones which groom the most. No coincidence.
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There are inbound free ride areas and itinerary routes in Europe. I've seem thousands on the groomed slopes and only 2 people on the ungroomed areas.
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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@TTT, no. That's ridiculous. You've clearly then never skied in Chamonix, Portes du Soleil, Grand Massif, Verbier, Courmayeur, Monterosa, Espace Killy, etc.
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FAQ
Lots of them can't ski/board very well but they get their kicks from jumps, rails, boxes etc
