Real Estate, Retirement, Rope Down

Monday greetings…the Snowjournal website is reporting that the Plymouth Notch VT ski area is for sale; this area was originally called Round Top, and then became the Bear Creek Mountain Club about 15 years ago. With about 150 acres of lift served skiing, spiffy new lodge, and some 750 acres in total, the current asking price is $7.5 million. Probably too high…Norwegian ski god Aksel Lund Svindal has announced that he’s going to compete in the upcoming Åre world championships — and then retire! He’s been banged up quite a bit lately, and the clock keeps ticking. Unless Svindal adds to the tally in Åre, he’ll retire with 36 World Cup wins, 2 overall titles, 9 discipline titles, and 2 Olympic Golds. That’s Svindal above on one of his Olympic runs…hijinks at Brighton Resort UT last weekend when season passholder, 21-year-old Nathan Harrison was told that parking lots were full and he had to turn around and head back down the canyon. Harrison began protesting and honking his horn, then drove over some cones, which caught the attention of a local police officer. The two then scuffled for a bit, until Harrison was subdued. He has since been charged with a first-degree felony count of disarming a police officer, a second-degree felony count of assault against a peace officer and a class B misdemeanor count of interference with an arresting officer. Plus he got a traffic ticket…electrical system blamed for problems on Stowe VT’s Lookout Double chairlift this weekend, some 160 skiers needed to be roped down and the process took a chilly 2 1/2 hours…other lift problems in New England, seems a chair and a t-bar at Waterville Valley NH were awaiting US Forest Service inspection, which was delayed by fed shutdown. Word from Mt. Tecumseh yesterday is that the chair is up and running following a new transformer install…no news yet on Sunday River‘s White Heat chair, that lift serves their best known trail…final results from the Hahnenkamm this weekend, as we mentioned Dominik Paris won the downhill Friday. Yesterday’s Super G saw Josef Ferstl take first place exactly 40 years after his father, Sepp Ferstl, won the Downhill. Johan Clarey was second, and Paris was on the podium again in third. Frenchman Noel Clement was slalom sieger on Saturday, followed by Marcel Hirscher and Lexi Pinturault. Meanwhile in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Austria’s Nicole Schmidhofer won the Super G, followed by Sofia Goggia and Lara Gut-Berami, both of whom are battling back from injury. Tough news in that vein for Michele Gisin, the scion of the popular Swiss skiing family who suffered cartilage damage and an ACL strain in her right knee during the event and will miss the rest of the season. Downhill action yesterday saw Austria’s Stephanie Venier take her first world cup victory, Goggia again with the runner up slot. Germany’s Kira Wiedle was third, much to the delight of the home crowd. Kind of an unusual end to the event, Federica Sosio of Italy crashed and required a helicopter evac with a fracture to her left leg. The jury elected to cancel the remaining 10 competitors for safety concerns, and declared the results official…Sugarloaf Maine getting into the New England spirit for the upcoming Superbowl, anyone wearing a Patriots jersey will get a discount ticket on Sunday. I don’t want to tell you my opinion of wearing a jersey with another man’s name on it…