skelley19;c-69673 wrote
Honest question, what else besides the tram has stopped working or been phased out.
Start with the magic carpet right behind the ski school. It fell into disrepair and they just left it there. Never runs, not even listed on the map anymore.
You can see the remnants of it when you walk up from the pods. Like the debris field from that WW2 bomber up on Moosilauke.
Speaking of the ski school, one of those buildings has been unusable for the past year because the shingles blew off the roof and it's been leaking ever since.
Look across from there to the brookside chair - literally never runs. How's that going to work out when/if they finally decide to fire it up? No maintenance, no use... no problem!
It was intended to provide true beginner access to the brookside slope - but the mountain has all but abandoned beginners at this point. The ski school runs the handle tow themselves because Mountain Ops won't do it. Without that you have never-evers trying to lap the tuckerbrook quad.
The beginner experience has been abandoned to try to salvage the intermediate/advanced experience which makes the mountain at least seem viable. The eagle cliff barely runs these days - mostly on days when the 25 years young detach is broken down. So advanced beginners graduating out of Tuckerbrook have one option: The Peabody. Which puts them on the Links where Patrol finds them before handing them off to Littleton Fire/Rescue.
The Zoomer chair was down for over 6 weeks last year (2 years ago?) with a seized gearbox. Does that happen with a diligent preventative maintenance program? Just asking. And that chair is 40 years old. You say: "Throwback Mountain". I say: "Reagan Administration".
The nearby Ernie's Haus was supposed to be reopened as a public lodge after FSC vacated it. That never happened - so it'll soon be looking like those buildings at the bottom of Avalanche. Allowed to deteriorate until rehabilitation becomes too expensive and then just abandoned.
There used to be a viable shuttle from the tram to the Peabody base - you could get to the tram and see the line back up the hill and get yourself back to the Peabody faster than you could get onto the tram. Those days are gone - I haven't seen that shuttle running in years. So you roll the dice - head to the tram and find out if you're going to spend the next hour+ there when you get there. Other mountains have lift status signs that update in realtime to help you make those decisions... um, yeah. Realtime and Cannon... that's rich.
That fancy Peabody lodge you speak of? They run hot water into the toilets to keep the pipes from freezing - can't make that up. And check out the screen door in the back of the main room downstairs. A screen door inside a building - that's an innovative solution they just don't teach in HVAC school anymore. The stair treads are worn bare throughout the lodge - people trip over them all the time. Nobody cares. Lawsuit? Meh, it's a state building...
The place is legit falling apart. It's band-aids on top of band-aids on top of band-aids.
They can't even paint the Peabody chair - the whole thing is rusting away right behind the base lodge. It's the first thing that newcomers see when they walk out the door.
It looked even worse on WMUR when they were out for the lift evac last winter. Seriously, look at the Peabody chair at Cannon and then go look at the Kanc8 at Loon. Throwback mountain, indeed.
Nothing lasts forever - the clock is always ticking and without a substantial infusion of renovation money (above and beyond what they're talking for the tram), the degradation will continue.
As infrastructure fails without any means to fix it, it'll just sit there. The idle tram on one side, the magic carpet debris field on the other... and everything in between.
