Friends, Family and Fans of Echo,

I wanted to write up a quick message to share some more detail about our efforts to get night skiing going this season and the challenges we've faced.

First off, a major thank you to all of you for your support and understanding the last couple weeks. Every season has it's challenges, many of which we don't share much about because the nature of the business is just to adapt and overcome whenever necessary. There's always a fire somewhere (sometimes literally) and yet, we've gotten pretty good at coming up with solutions to keep things rolling forward as smoothly as possible. Night Skiing Go Live this year has been a lot bumpier than we'd like.

Not too unlike some recent years, we've had a slower snow start than we'd like, some tricky wind and weather patterns, and some pre-season power issues that all contributed to snowmaking progress and lack thereof. Still, our Mountain Ops. team and Snowmakers in particular, have been busting their tails to lay down as much snow as possible and to get more terrain open. As some of you may have noticed, we had snow on middle and lower Hollywood early last week, build out happened over Christmas and into Wednesday, lights were live and going, Patrol set ropes and fencing, and we felt fully ready to open for night operations. Then, right as our Marketing Manager was set to hit "Send" on the announcement on Thursday, we turned the lights on early to do one last test. After just a couple minutes, the breaker tripped. This has led us on a roller coaster of believing we had the problem identified and solved nearly every day for the last week. We've been replacing breakers, re-doing electrical connections, testing lights, and chasing circuits up and down the mountain.

Obviously, lights are a pretty critical component to night skiing, so unfortunately, this isn't something small we can just work around. But, we don't have any indication that this is a larger or critical failure in our infrastructure that would prevent night skiing from opening very soon...like literally any day. In fact, we're taking this hour by hour as we troubleshoot the problem and try different solutions. We have our operations team ready to adjust to longer days, staff scheduled and ready, marketing itching to send out our official announcement, and you all stoked to get some laps in after dark.

Our team is literally out there working on it as I type this message so I'm expecting to have more information as the day progresses. I fully expect to have a solution in place and for things to go live at any moment.

Stay tuned here, via email, and on our social channels as we get this problem solved and fully into the swing of things.

Moving Forward

In the short-term, some of you have expressed your disappointment and frustration about the situation. We absolutely share in, and likely feel more intensely, some of those same emotions. No one wants this to get resolved and moving forward more than we do. Still, there's a lot of season left and we feel that there's a ton of value to be had in a $99 - $149 Night Ski season pass, that includes a free $39 tubing session and $5 free in the restaurant. Heck, another resort in Colorado charges that much for just 1 night ticket. But, if you don't feel the same way, we get it. As such, we're happy to refund your Night Ski Season Pass purchase between now and whenever Night Skiing opens, as long as you didn't take advantage of the Midweek days we opened up to you a couple weeks ago. Once we're live though, we'll revert back to our All Season Pass Sales are Final policy. If you want to request a refund on your Night ski season pass, submit your request here and our team will follow up with you.

Looking out a bit longer-term, we'll be sharing more information and details about some of our capital plans in the coming months, but we are STOKED about what's in the works. Our new owner is thrilled with what we've been building, but he wants to see our progress accelerate so we're talking about some big improvements to things like snowmaking infrastructure, base area improvements, off-season additions, and more. All of this is in an effort to avoid some of these same headaches, delays and challenges in the future, which ultimately means a better (and in this case, a more reliable experience) for you all.

Questions, comments, feedback, etc? We're all about it. Send us a message @ info@echomtn.com.

Thanks again for all the love and support each year. We literally wouldn't be here without you.


Best,
Fred Klaas
General Manager