Ski Burke

Day 2 brought in some grease time and the crew got fully versed in fork operation, repair and maintenance-after some chalk talk on suspension theory, of course. We continued the day with brake design, operation, installation, fluid bleeds and maintenance.

The Burke Rental Shop team is on the road this week, off to the Norco Bike Headquarters in Toronto, Canada!  We are so excited to be here for hands-on expert training with the Norco staff.  This summer, Burke Mountain Resort and the Burke Bike Park are thrilled to offer our guests a full fleet of both downhill and XC mountian bikes with the opening of our new Norco Demo Center located at the Sherburne Base Lodge.   

Hurricane Sandy has come and gone and we were fortunate to get thru this weather event with no significant damages.  We hope all of our customers to the south were equally as lucky.  It’s been a very busy October and we are looking forward to the start of ski season- but before we talk about the winter plans ahead- I want to take a quick look back on a great month of October.

For many of you, there's still time to squeeze in a few more weekends of fun in the sun before this beautiful summer season leaves us behind. For us, the end of the Labor Day Weekend signals the start of a very busy time here at the mountain. We now have winter on the brain.  We are seeing more & more winter staff  back at the mountain each day, with specific jobs to get done before we open the doors to another ski season.  The snowguns have arrived, keeping our mountain ops guys very busy, and the trail crew started yesterday on trail maintenance. There is work to be done to the lodges, lifts, cafeterias and roads-it’s go time.

It’s been a rough start to December, but we are finally getting some consistently cold temperatures so the snowmakers can do their thing. We have had the first multi-day stretch of cold weather, and it is very satisfying to see guns blasting everywhere I look.  We were able to pull off the East Coast Snocross snowmobile event with the hard work of our dedicated staff–one of the benefits of the event from a skier perspective is the amount of snow we are able to make with fan guns provided by East Coast Snocross, on the lower mountain. Our snowcats are spreading all the snow we made  for that event, allowing us to open a good percentage of our lower area over the next couple of days. 

With this brand new website our marketing department told me (I am still not sure how that works) that I need to write a regular blog as the GM. No problem I said, this should be easy, we are only in the middle of the busiest offseason we have ever had, so there is plenty to talk about. But what should the first blog be about?