Outdoors Magazine

Why Crystal is Opening for One Day of Skiing Tomorrow

Posted on the 01 October 2013 by Kimkircher @kimkircher
John Kircher

This man loves snow

Maybe you’ve already seen it on Facebook. Perhaps you are one of the lucky 75 to comment first on Crystal’s post today. If so, you’ve heard the stoke. After a little investigative reporting this morning, when a few of us rode the gondola for some “exploratory turns” in Green Valley, my husband’s eyes grew wide. What if we could open up and let a small number of people ski this early snow? What if we limited it to just 50 or so people? Could it be done? We really shouldn’t let this snow go to waste.

This is how John’s mind works.

Even though this is a business, even though we are supposed to think about things like “the bottom line” and making a profit, really he’s in this business because he loves to ski.

He knows what skiers want because he’s one of them.

John turned his “what if” questions into reality this afternoon, by opening our online commerce page to 51 lucky people. So many people tried to buy those tickets, the site crashed. I’m not quite sure how many people it takes to crash a website, but I’m guessing it’s a lot.

Green Valley, Crystal Mountain

View into Green Valley this morning

So we shifted to Plan B, which offered 75 tickets to the first people to comment on our Facebook post (we wanted to open it to more because many, many people were glued to their FB page, unable to get anything else done).

Crystal Mountain

Keith Rollins and Martin Rand, rock stars

And now it’s really happening. We are going to run the gondola tomorrow for some lift-assisted backcountry skiing to 75 very lucky people.

It’s going to be a hoot.

Green Valley, Crystal Mountain

Green Valley this morning

There are still pockets of the ski industry that aren’t corporatized. Some ski areas are still run by people with a passion for the sport. And I’m so fortunate to be married to one of those people.

 


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