Well, sometimes hiking up does correlate with skiing down, as in your case, Nay!
Speaking of which, last Friday I hiked up one side of Beavers @ A Basin, and down the other. Being a smart phone owner instead of a wooden shoe dinosaur would have helped here (for photos), but a few comments will have to do.
The area being developed looked so pristine, untouched, amazing flowers, moss and lichens in the forest. Very different than it will look a few years from now, I'm afraid.
I'd say I got a close up look at about 2/3rds of the terrain. Nice stuff. So much fairly steep glade skiing.
I just hope it doesn't all get bumped out.
If it stays fairly unbumped, it will indeed be a game changer.
There were several work crews up in there chainsawing away as I hiked. 4-5 guys, at least. The highest one up, just below tree line, noticed me and came over to talk. He said I was the first hiker he'd seen over there, ever.
He confirmed that they are working to open glades a bit on three runs so far, one below the Pali Ridge (almost finished), the other two more in the center of the new terrain, side by side (mostly still to go this summer, as far as I could tell).
I walked good stretches of those three runs. They are marked with checkered tape - red for hiker's right edge of the run and yellow for hiker's left edge of the run. So it's easy to see where they are going to be in the trees/glades. Very exciting.
I was pleasantly surprised at just how much work they had been doing, in glade terrain mostly, clearing away "limbs and leaners," cutting up big "fallen bridge" type trunks. They were using the smaller cut green boughs to carpet possible erosion areas. And a bit bigger branches they were stuffing against tree trunk clusters, for padding there and possibly to prevent dangerous snow funnels come ski season, it seemed.
In addition, they have begun cutting away preliminary openings for where the new lift will go. Hiking through there, I saw it runs diagonally across the central forested rib and its two runs being glade cleared, about 2/3rds of the way down.
The crew member I talked to said the men I'd seen on the trails were regular A Basin employees, but they had also hired an outside company for a separate pro crew of clearcutters, especially for the work at the bottom between the old and new areas, as I might have noticed.
Not so great, he said, but they had to have a way to get the snowcats back and forth, to work the new area regularly during the season. His crew was using that clearcut swath to get back to the main area each evening, after riding up the Pali lift in the mornings to get to work.
At the bottom I walked alongside that clearcut area. They've laid the fallen log sections for a maybe 15-20 yard wide "carpet" of cut trees in a maybe 25 yard wide lane up through the forest that I walked beside for a while, on the side trail the crew members had obviously made to get back and forth.
Maybe they are leaving that "carpet road" of cut trees in place for some reason, perhaps as a base layer below the snow for the snowcats to go on, not at all sure.
The Beavers ski lift won't go in until next summer, but clearly the area will be different for those who venture over there this season for a preview.