Alpine Meadows

October 31st, 2004.

Dear diary, Alpine Meadows, first ever day patrolling at Alpine.

I'm on a mitigation route with the patrol director, just me and him, first day.

He says, "Are you kidding me? Do you know how to throw?" "Uh, yeah," I said after having thrown my first hand charge woefully short of the rollover that I was aiming for.

That was a defining moment for me, a test of capability and trust perhaps, but a realization that this world will humble me and can certainly kill me.

January 27th, 2006.

Dear diary, Alpine Meadows again, control route in Beaver Bowl.

I'm a second-year patroller.

Castle Peak is the deadliest avalanche accident involving skiers and snowboards, snowboarders in United States history, and it's tied for the deadliest in North American history, alongside a Canadian Mountain Holidays heli-ski avalanche in the Bugaboos of British Columbia, Canada, on March 12th, 1991, which also killed nine people.

So it's the deadliest avalanche of any kind in this country since 1981, when eleven climbers died on Mount Rainier in Washington, and is the deadliest avalanche in California history, passing the very well-known 1982 Alpine Meadows slide that killed seven, and they made that very good movie called Buried about that situation.

Two notes on that.

The skier and snowboarder distinction is doing real work because Rainier was climbers.

Alpine Meadows was hit mostly resort staff and people at the base of the ski area.

They weren't skiing anymore.

They were mostly just on their feet.

... uh, while he was commercial fishing.

And so last weekend they had a celebration of life for him at Alpine Meadows at the lodge, and there was- Dude, there was like 300 people there

Oh.

It was amazing.

So if you take those out, there's 17 Garaventa SeaTecs out there at 15 ski areas.

And they're ski areas of all shapes and sizes, right? Alpine Meadows is owned by Altera.

And maybe Vail wants to tell them to go eat dirt.

Fine.

know,

we we were able to teach lessons at Homewood, but we were offering the normal prices from the year before, which were more or less, I would say, 10 percent below what, you know, Squaw Valley Alpine Meadows up the road was charging.

And we were not.

Yeah.

It was a pretty proud moment.

I find it actually quite moving, but it was our California colleagues, Courtney Meyerholz at Sugar Bowl there and Alpine Meadows, Evan Salke and then Jeff Goldstone from Palisades Tahoe.

They hosted our global senior leadership team, our legal team and our marketing team right up onto the ski hills and did various presentations and Bayer Holtz actually shut down a section of the mountain, shut down a lift and did an avalanche or demo and two hand charges right up on top of the hill, middle of the day, shut down the mountain because they remember a time when they were buying explosives, you know, effectively out of the back of a truck in Reno.

That's when we had those 28 minute burn times on fuse.