As you may know, I've been the Ops Director at Magic Mountain in VT since the new ownership took over 5 years ago, and we've been changing a TON of stuff since then. Literally millions invested in improvements, blah blah blah... Getting to the point, last year we attempted to run a small night park next to our tubing park, with limited success for a lot of reasons- all of which we are addressing this year in a BIG way.
Essentially we're doing away with tubing, and putting some money behind turning the tube park area into a slopestyle-type park that will be *directly* under our newly revamped and super bright LED lighting. The steepness of the area and the rollovers in there made it really hard to use for tubing, but that will serve PERFECTLY for a choose-your-own-adventure mini slopestyle format with the features arranged into the rollers.
The area is served by a handle tow, and is about 600' of vertical. We hope to run it until at least 8pm Fridays & Saturdays and for the first time ever we will have a dedicated maintenance team to ensure everything stays legit. We even hope to host some quality rail jams and competitions, but those details are still a ways off.
We're a total mom & pop mountain, but with Dark Sky regs in VT being what they are, the fact that we are grandfathered in for night lights because of our tubing operations is HUGE- installing new ones is essentially impossible. There are no other night skiing offerings around, and while this is a smaller area it should be a complete blast- hot lapping a fun little park that's well lit and fully visible from the bar is going to be awesome. I really hope we can get some passholders from the other bigger resorts nearby (Stratton, Okemo, Bromley, Killington, Mt. Snow etc.) to come over once their lifts stop spinning. We will never be Carinthia, but we can make this area the coolest little after-hours session park in the area and if people regularly come, we can keep building it better & better ever year.
Here's a pic of the area I'm talking about for visual refrence.
The area off to the right is where it *used to be* but the new location is where the grass is striped out with the disc golf basket in the middle. The handle tow shown to the right is also being moved out of there, so that whole area will be much cleaner.
We will be offering a park-only pass FYI, and I really hope to see an overwhelming amount of NS die cuts getting on that handle tow.
Feel free to AMA, I will try to check back in periodically, and share pics of progress as it happens. Cheers!!
