Mt. Bachelor -- the ski resort -- was purchased by Powder Corp. a few years ago. This was our second year skiing under the new managament, and we're not happy with it.
We had high hopes when Powder Corp., a corporation that owns several ski resorts in the west, purchased Mt. Bachelor. We had visions of improved service, new facilities, maybe even reduced prices.
We should have known better. The first signal was when Mt. Bachelor cancelled a long-held policy of reduced lift prices for K-12 students, a single-handed assassination of one of the best marketting strategies a ski resort can make. This alienated the Bend community, although it did have a single advantage in reducing the number of snow boarders on the mountain. The next year had us skiing only sporadically, as my job situation was looking bleak.
Then we left Bend, moving to Pennsylvania, following the jobs like the proverbial hunter/gatherers following herds of buffalo. We didn't ski the following year, since getting settled in PA was taking most of our time. This year, however, we rented a condo with our relatives from California in Bend and returned for a week long ski vacation on what was once the best skiing on the West Coast.
This year had Bachelor receiving more snow than any other resort in the country, which boded well for our vacation. It quickly turned to a disaster. I won't go into details about the trip, but here's what you can expect if you make the mistake of traveling to Bend to ski at Mt. Bachelor:
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They don't keep the parking lot plowed.
Every day we went up to the mountain, we were able to drive all the way to the parking lots without putting on traction devices. Every day, when we got to the parking lots, we got stuck and had to put on chains just to navigate the parking lot. The difference? ODOT plowed the roads up to the parking lots and Bachelor is responsible for keeping the lots clear. They simply didn't. Once, we had to be towed out to a clear area, because even with chains, the lots were unnavigable.
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The food facilities were inadequate for the number of guests at the mountain.
Lines stretched outside. Waits for food were on the order of an hour or more, even around two P.M.
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The lifts were often down due to maintenance issues.
At one point, we waited twenty minutes while the lift was stopped, and the next day the same lift was down for ten minutes. These are just the times when we noticed that the lifts were down. Considering that there are a half dozen lifts on the mountain, and that we weren't always watching the lifts, I'm guessing they were down more often than that.
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To add insult to injury, the lifts closed early.
I wear a watch that is synchronized with the atomic clocks in Colorado, the ones that define time in the United States. I'd expect that, considering the amount of time that the lifts were disabled, that they might keep the lifts running a little later rather than shutting them early.
We lived in Bend for four years in the late 90's. I used to have a year pass at Bachelor. I'd go up to the mountain before work to ski for a couple of hours. This is absolutely, by far, the worst management of the mountain that I've ever experienced. It was so bad that we will not be returning to Bend for skiing, which makes it unlikely that we'll be returning to Bend, full stop.
Next year, we'll be spending the winter in Whistler.