15 replies to this topic

[SkiBachelor]

ASC has entered into a definitive agreement to sell its two Maine ski resorts, Sugarloaf and Sunday River to Boyne USA for $77 million.

http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/g...amp;newsLang=en

With The Canyons being the only remaining ASC ski resort left, it will be interesting to see what happens to it in the near future. Will ASC continue with its master plan of turning The Canyons into a mega-resort, modeled after the 1996 master plan or will it be sold to put ASC to rest for good?

[Jonni]

I don't think that ASC will be put to bed entirely. They've wanted to have The Canyons to be their flagship for a while, and I have a feeling that they won't try to deviate from that idea. Though I'm sure that if they were made an offer that they really couldn't refuse, they might actually take it.

[SkiBachelor]

Hopefully ASC will be more careful with its money, but I'm still noticing some bad spending habits. For instance, it replaced its Red Pine Lodge with a brand new one which doesn't look much bigger than the old one this past summer. While the 10 year old lodge was fairly small, the new one should have been made twice as big.

[Peter]

I think Boyne is smart to have resorts evenly distributed in the Cascades, Rockies, Midwest, and East.

[floridaskier]

I hope ASC has enough money after selling all their other resorts to put it back into The Canyons. They need to give people staying at Deer Valley and Park City more of a reason to come out to ski there, and that doesn't mean building more condos at the base. They need to work on the layout of the whole mountain. Some lifts need to be built or moved, and that doesn't mean moving Red Hawk further away from the area it's supposed to serve and then never opening it. They essentially downgraded a mid-90s CTEC quad to a 1965 Riblet double to create Dreamscape. In my opinion, everything past 9990 adds nothing to the resort, and that's not saying that the Dreamscape area couldn't be fun, it just needs to be reworked

If you look at old Park West and Wolf Mountain trail maps, the previous owners had a much better setup for the old mountain (Super Condor and Golden Eagle area), the best part of the resort. The way it is now, it's hard to get out of there, and Golden Eagle isn't always open, and they don't make much snow down there. And with so much of the focus on the Dreamscape area, they should make it easier to get in and out of there without having to take the flat endless Harmony cat track all the way back to Tombstone.


Does anyone have the map of ASC's planned expansion for The Canyons from the late 90s? It had lifts all over the place, many of them kind of redundant, but better than the setup they have now

Also, when did POWDR take over Killington and Pico? I thought they were sold to some real estate company. http://www.parkcitymountain.com/winter/com...orts/index.html

[SkiBachelor]

Killington and Pico were purchased by Powdr and the real-estate firm as a partnership.

[Lift Dinosaur]

Jonni, on Jun 5 2007, 04:49 PM, said:

They've wanted to have The Canyons to be their flagship for a while,

To have a flagship, don't you have to have a fleet (or at least more than one ship)?

Dino

[parisandrewsdaddy]

Bend Over Your Now Employed

BOYNE

[tahoeistruckin]

People who ski DV go there for one major reason. The SERVICE. DV was created,in keeping the service there, as one would find at many of the worlds finest hotels. Secondly The FOOD. Yes it's exspenive to eat there, but you gotta pay the awesome Culenary staff, a decent wage, for the the suff they create. We aren't talking about hiring people from BK/ Micky D's . We are talking about hiring people who have spent years in the kitchens, of some of the worlds finest resurants, as well as the best Culenary Schools on earth.

The Canyons wilL never ever reach that same level that DV created. In all theses resort rankings that come out year after year. Whos ALWAYS IN THE TOP 5? It sure isn't the Canyons or PCMR. Why? I'ts ther service and food. People want good food and service. And when they are loaded down with a $$$$$ bank account, they expect they best. DV set the bar, others try thier hardest to jump over, yet fail.

On another ski related forum this past season, i read of a lodging situation gone bad with a family of 5 who had trouble at the Canyons, who told them they had reservations for the small kids to get in ski school. When they went to check in, The Canyons told them they were full, and thier reservations would not be honored. The family took thier kids to ski school at DV. And even thought they were full up, they accepted thier kids, pulling a SR. instructor ,in to teach the kids. Now thats great service. And this family say they always used to go to the Canyons, but now in the future they will consider DV more so.

Yes the Canyons layout need major help. When i pay $$ to go skiing, i want to be able to ski with in 5-10 mins of ckicking inot my skis. Not walk to a dola, ride it to another area, then hike it over to another lift. At DV, once you get your pass, you ride Carpenter, for 5 mins, and then you take a left at the top, and your on your way down the hill.
They showed of followed the layout of Parkwest. Now that was a good set up.

[tahoeistruckin]

SkiBachelor, on Jun 5 2007, 04:15 PM, said:

Hopefully ASC will be more careful with its money, but I'm still noticing some bad spending habits. For instance, it replaced its Red Pine Lodge with a brand new one which doesn't look much bigger than the old one this past summer. While the 10 year old lodge was fairly small, the new one should have been made twice as big.

Did they tear down Red Pine, and where is this new lodge.?

[SkiBachelor]

The new Red Pine Lodge at The Canyons is located pretty much in the same spot as the old one, but it appears to be closer to the Saddleback Express.

If you go to The Canyons' website, you can watch a video (podcast) from ealier this season which has a small clip of it in the background.

I personally feel that The Canyons' mid mountain area (Red Pine Lodge area) is very similar to that of Deer Valley's Silver Lake area. Both require you to use some amount of energy (doesn't bother me) to get from one place to the other unless your going down to the Wasatch Express. However, I don't think The Canyons will ever be able to fix its layout issue since that's just how the terrain is there. Deer Valley has the same problem is some areas too.

[Peter]

Tahoeistruckin, you are assuming everyone wants the luxury experience, which is not true. Park City seems to be doing just fine, they just have a different image and a different group of customers. The Canyons isn't necessarily going for the luxury DV image, but they do need to come up with one group of skiers to serve, not try and get everyone. In Washington, there are clear groups of people who ski at each resort. Snoqualmie is the lower end learning place with terrain parks and cheap season passes, Stevens is mid range, and Crystal is higher end, with more expensive passes, nicer facilities, etc. Not every resort wants to be like Deer Valley.

[floridaskier]

I remember in the early days of The Canyons, before they started building the village and the Cabriolet and you used to be able to park right next to Red Hawk and the gondola, the place had a different feel. There were employees out there every morning all over the place greeting people, smiling, handing out donut holes, and that kind of thing, and now when you get off the Cabriolet, the entire village, especially the whole area with the amphitheater and all the stores, everything except the line at the gondola is completely dead. The first time riding the gondola was really fun. They had all the signs with the plans for the mountain and the village, and the comparisons to Sun Valley in 1952, Aspen in 1962, Vail in 1972, Beaver Creek in 1992, and The Canyons in 2002. Then I remember during the day that we spent a lot of time riding the Raptor lift. That was probably in the first or second years, when the area ended at 9990 Express. I was only 8 or 9 so I don't really remember the details but that's how I remember it from then

Maybe The Canyons is trying to go after the same type of customer as Deer Valley, but DV gets everything right and The Canyons misses it. At DV, the best blue cruisers, the ones that their target market is after, are at Northside, which is one lift (Quincy) away from mid-mountain. At PCMR, the bottom King Con is one lift (Eagle) from the base. At The Canyons, from Red Pine, go down Chicane, up Tombstone, down Another World to Ripsaw, up Peak 5, down Harmony, up Dreamscape, and once you're finished, it's a two-mile flat road back to Tombstone.

Sure, there are parts of the mountain at Deer Valley that wouldn't be there at all except for the houses (Deer Crest and Silver Strike, and a few runs on Bald Eagle) but even at Deer Crest, there are legitimate ski trails, not just access roads to get to the houses. The houses on Deer Crest aren't even where most of the ski terrain is anyway, most of them are on private trails. The private trails are cattracks that are only there to have ski in/ski out access, and that's fine. But when a third of the resort is flat cattracks several miles long rolling through the houses, it starts to get annoying

[boardski]

I first skied the Canyons in 2001 and returned every year for three years after that. In recent visits, I have become a bit discouraged with the constant rising lift ticket rates with very little to show for it. When I have been there, I enjoy a few runs of Condor but then proceed to 9990/ Peak 5 for most of the day. I find it a huge hassle to end up at the bottom of Tombstone so easily waiting in line if the slightest wrong turn is made. I really did not care for the runs off Tombstone. Canyons also seems to be in need of another lift in addition to the gondola/ Golden Eagle to access the Peak 5/ 9990/ Dreamscape/ DayBreak part of the mountain directly from the base. The lift could originate near the former bottom terminal of the Red Hawk chair and have a two-way midway reload slightly lower than the top of Tombstone and the top terminal high enough to access either Peak 5/ 9990 or Dreamscape/ Daybreak. The lift could then be downloaded at the end of the day to eliminate the need to beat the clock to get to the top of the Gondola. This lift should have been built instead of the Tombstone upgrade to HSS. I didn't know about the Red Lodge replacement. That sounds like a horrendous waste of $$. The problem is, they don't seem to listen to what their guests would like to see and seem to make many lift decisions on a whim and many of those decisions turn out useless. It seems they need to take some time to figure out how to make the mountain able to be skied more efficient before any additional money is spent on lift changes. Until then, places like Solitude and Brighton have terrain similar to Peak 5/ 9990 which can be accessed quickly for a fraction of the cost.

[Peter]

Part of the problem is that the family that owns the area between the village and the mountain is suing the Canyons for some sort of land use issue. Therefore the gondola's operation is somewhat in jeopardy, although I am sure it will eventually settle.

[floridaskier]

Interesting how ASC still has pictures of Steamboat and Heavenly in the picture rotation on their home page