Quote:
Originally Posted by zahav
That's weird because Whistler has gotten 3 feet of snow in 2 days, my friends went up and said conditions were great and there was tons of good terrain
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I have been to Whistler the past 3 weekends. First time of the season was definitely a bust with only 9 runs open and long lineups. Basically you could only ski where they can make some snow. Our second time was last weekend and conditions had improved significantly and there were 25 runs open.
Yesterday was our third time up there and it was fantastic, as Whistler has been getting almost
2 meters of snow in the past 7 days! It was pure powder madness and snow was knee-deep in some ungroomed runs around Crystal Express.
In the afternoon, they also managed to open up 7th Heaven for the first time this season and people had so much fun enjoying first tracks of the year in the deep powder glades.
Yesterday was also the first day the new Blackcomb Gondola was in use. I am not too happy about it, as it is cumbersome to remove your skis at the midstation, which is slightly below where Solar Coaster used to be. It wasn't super busy and it seemed like they aren't filling every gondola at the bottom in anticipation of midstation boardings. It is a fast ride up, but there was no good reason for them to remove Solar Coaster, as the gondola runs a different line up and they would have only had to re-arrange the top to accommodate both gondola and the old chair lift - totally doable and likely not even more expensive, should they have scratched a midstation from the plan.
The new four-person Catskinner Express on the other hand is excellent and a new hidden gem on Blackcomb (on Whistler side Garbanzo Express is the other hidden gem). The new 6-person Emerald Express is doing a decent job, but lineups can still be horrible. They should have added another 4-person express chair and kept the old one to run in parallel.
I hope they will continue lift investments and I am so happy that the season improved so much after first few weeks. With a meter more snow in the forecast, skiing should be superb over Christmas!