Taking a step back and looking at the big picture, there is lots of money being thrown around the valley by Bacon. To the tune of $300+ million. Makes me wonder where he is going with all these developments. What is his end game? He is a smart rich dude, I am sure he knows.
I have been skiing Taos for a long time. They have lost lots of skier visits over the last 20+ years. Many of the regulars have aged out or died. They need new blood. I am not seeing it. The place is like a ghost town most afternoons. The weekends are busier but not like most other resorts that I have visited recently. I meant not being crowded is a good thing but having the resort going out of business due to insufficient skier visits is definitely a bad thing.
We called chair #8 as the slow chair to nowhere. The groomers are usually used for teaching purposes. It is also the catch all for the skiers coming off the West Basin Ridge and Wild West Glade. With the new chair #1, we just by pass #8 and skied down to #1 to get back up to #2. Much quicker. A new chair will stop the traffic from going all the way down to #1. Reducing crowds on White Feather. That is a good thing.
Chair #2 do get a little crowded in the morning. 5 to10 minutes wait at most. It's usually ski on in the afternoon. A new chair would make lapping the upper front much faster but I'll need younger legs. I see a high speed quad here rather than a six pack.
What all these new chair still need is more skiers visits.
The gondola along the Return Trail is as much a summer project as it is for winter operations. The main base for Taos summer operations is up at the area around chair #4, The Bavarian and the Phenix Grill. Parking is very limited up there. Twining Road is the only access to that area. Twining Road is a unpaved dirt road. In order for the Ski Valley to ramp up summer operations there they needed an alternative method to get people up there without their cars.
In the winter, the gondola can move skiers to chair #4 from the base on a big powder day. They can open chair #4 area quickly since avy mitigation on Kachina Peak is performed by Gazex. Much quicker than the manual mitigation methods on the Highline Ridge which sits above Honeysuckle. The primary access path from chair #2 to the backside. This will split the crowd making a big powder day lift line more tolerable.
I am still wondering where all these developments are leading to.
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