How many damn groomed runs does a mountain need to have?
Resorts put all this money into piling up beautiful mounds of man-made snow, only to flatten it all out before letting anyone ski on it. God forbid we get to ski on anything more interesting than a flat sheet of boilerplate before mid-march when it decides to snow an inch or two.
I hiked up to get two turns on a closed trail getting blasted by the guns last week at my local before they groomed it, squeezing what ever fluff there was into a solid corduroy strip of death. They were my best turns of the day. It's more work for the resort to groom it, why can't they leave some nice whalebacks with quasi-natural takeoffs and landings for us jibbers?
# of groomed trails at my local: 40
# of snowmaking piles at my local: 0
It's time for this to stop. Tell your local to stop grooming trails today.