Once again, it's Loveland vs Arapahoe!

While the crisp fall air was a good reminder of the season to come this morning, there is an annual event out west that officially marks the countdown to ski season. The competition to open for skiing and riding first in the United States has waged between Loveland and Arapahoe Basin, both in Colorado, for decades. Starting as early as September, these two ski ares on the continental divide start pumping out as much snow as they can and aren’t afraid to be proud that they are in competition. Due to the high elevation and less humidity, both areas have colder temps earlier than most and take advantage. They know that they might not have the most skier visits when the season is in full swing, but every year they put their stamp on the ski season!

Skilifts.org offers the right kind of addiction!

Are you excited for ski season? Is your resort planning or installing a new type of lifting that you've never seen before? Chances are that you can find pretty much any ski lift imaginable on skilifts.org. While they currently only cover resorts in the United States and Canada, you'll be amazed at the amount of pictures, states, and history packed onto this page. I will warm you, though, it is addictive. Once you click on a picture of an old lift and find out it was moved to another resort, you may find yourself searching on and on and on. There's also a forum where you can mingle with fellow lift geeks and industry reps.

What could have been for Mineral King Valley, CA

Back in the 1970’s, a man by the name of Walt Disney had a unique vision for a southern California valley that while destined for failure, was ahead of its’ time, like so many of his creations. And yet this was different in that Disney had eyes on a parcel of land called Mineral King Valley for a major southern California ski resort that would attract thousands of skiers from greater Los Angeles and south. While located on Forest Service land, Disney wanted to create a European style resort in that he planned a car-free village with use of the now famous monorails that had been installed in his two original parks as well as Seattle. Despite the environmental efforts, Disney’s and other developers’ bids were ultimately all denied and this steep-walled valley remains untouched.

Helping trace skiings visions

While we can easily take a journey into skiing’s history and see where rope tows used to incline and old Hall or Heron chairlifts used to swing, we don’t often look at what could have been. If we research through sites like NELSAP we find scores of little and medium sized hills that couldn’t make it for one reason or several others, but what about proposed ski areas and resorts. Earlier in this blog I talked about Lake Catamount near Steamboat Springs and to date that it one of the more famous of these failed or stalled proposals. And while lifts were never erected and base lodges never built, the history behind these proposals is really interesting and many have sketches. An easy way to learn some of this for your self is to head of to Colorado Ski History and look in their dedicated section. Maybe there’s some real estate you’d be interested in.