The new snow was tremendous with The Basin receiving 13 inches from this storm. The skiing was super fun and people loved skiing the spring powder. The storm however, wasn't without headaches. About 6ish this morning, caused by the heavy wet snow, a powerline feeding The Basin snapped causing a partial outage. It wasn't a total outage, just all the things that are important (chairlifts, networks, etc). We were able to run our front side lifts on auxiliary power and open at 9 AM. The lift crew did a great job keeping all those lifts open and loaded with skiers.
Our local energy provider, Xcel came right away and started trouble shooting the problem. The crew narrowed it down to the 5-mile stretch of powerline between Keystone and A-Basin. That zone is very difficult to access in winter. Louis engaged our Marketing photographer, Ian Zinner, to use his drone to fly the line. With the drone camera, Ian spotted a broken line about a mile below the ski area, off the highway in the deep snow. This saved the Xcel crew hours and hours of searching to find the problem. They went to work splicing and rigging. By mid-afternoon, full power was restored, all of our systems were running and we opened Zuma Lift and Bowl.
We anticipate all lifts and systems to be operating normally on Saturday.
It was definitely a "Serenity Now" kind of day.
