I wanted to share out an operational update we just put together here at Jay Peak relative to the upcoming holiday. That being our snowmaking and terrain expansion plans, lift openings and a few random bits of mica you may find appealing.

First of all, our Tram opens for the season tomorrow, Saturday December 21st, and will offer access to both the Vermonter and Upper Northway. This is an early open for the Tram and is the result of more than 100” of natural snow but also great snowmaking weather (and snowmaking management, frankly). The Village Double also opens tomorrow, accessing all of our ski-in/ski-out lodging which makes our homeowners extraordinarily cheery and, in turn, makes us so.

We just fired up snowmaking on Lower Goat to the Taxi trail and are pulling off Upper Goat at 4p today. We’ll finish off snowmaking on the entire Goat trail by Sunday and have it ready for first thing Monday morning when we plan on rolling out the Flyer (Quad) for its seasonal debut. We’ll have groomed terrain off Northway and Goat accessed by the Flyer Quad, starting Monday, December 23rd.

On Sunday we’ll also fire snowmaking on the Interstate/Jug Handle trails, run until Tuesday and plan to have it available, along with Lower River Quai, by Thursday the 26th. God willing and the creeks don’t rise it may even happen by Christmas Day, but let’s all just be happy with Thursday for now.

After that, we’ll push snowmaking to Ullr’s Dream beginning this Tuesday, Christmas Eve. We need 4 solid days over there and we hope to have that available by Saturday, December 28th. This will open up access to Beaver Pond glade which, as far as exciting pronouncements go, is right up there. Obviously, this is dependent on temps staying where we need them to and while there looks to be a slight moderation in temps, we’re also looking at multiple shots at natural snow across the week so stay tuned.

All in all, we expect to have every one of our lifts running and most of our terrain available for the holiday week.  We’re about a foot away from having all of our advanced glades open and wouldn’t be surprised to get those, getting us to 100% open, for some point across the holiday. Don’t string me up by my thumbs if this doesn’t happen, but we’ll be very close.

Honestly, from an operational perspective, the product we’ll have available for the holiday week will be as good, with respect to both quantity and quality, as we’ve seen in a while. Our old-and-in-the-way snowmakers say it’s the best snowmaking start they’ve seen, ever. Throw a storm or two on top of it, and it might not be all-time, but it’ll be nothing to shake a stick at for sure.

That’s what it looks like from here at this point. Just wanted to get you all into the loop.

Steve Wright
General Manager | Jay Peak Resort