Events, Operations
New Season, New Website, New Information
Aug 27, 2023
Welcome to our new website. We are excited to launch this new site. We were quite happy with our old website this new one will is similar to the navigation and style of our sister resorts - Snowriver Mountain Resort and Lutsen Mountains - while delivering some new features that I'll dive into below.
New Events Calendar Format
Our new event calendar format in my opinion is stellar and it will help you find fun events here at Granite Peak but also in our region to help you plan your vacation and family fun while visiting our beautiful area!
The events are set up of course by date and you can filter as such. To view our entire event calendar populate the date through April 30, 2024. But if you are only interested in say freestyle events you can use the filtering tag "freestyle" to see all of our rail jams, Grom Jams and that pertain to terrain park events throughout the course of the season.
We are also going to list regional events such as shows at the Grand Theatre, WausauEvents programs, and more that we believe you'll be interested in. This calendar will be constantly updated as events are announced by other organizations and this is just a start.
New Family Festivals
I'm excited to announce new dates & activities for our traditional Family Festivals this year. In year's past our Family Festivals have been pretty much contained to the first weekend of each month in January, February and March but this season they coincide with holidays throughout the season - Christmas/Holidays, Mardi Gras & St. Patrick's Day.
Our first Family Festival of the year will be the weekend before Christmas (December 15-17) and will feature plenty of fun for kids and parents alike. This event weekend will feature a visit from the big guy himself along with Buddy the Elf. Kids and parents can sign up for a unique experience only Granite Peak can offer - Groomer Rides with Santa! Later that Saturday we'll have a fireworks, light up our resort with lights, and kids can decorate their own holiday cookies with our food and beverage team to take home or probably just eat then.
Later in the year we'll celebrate Mardi Gras in February (Feb. 9 - 11) with plenty of beads and then in March we will have a resort wide Irish celebration for St. Patrick's Day (March 15 - 17)!
Navigate
The website is broken down into three main categories: Discover, On-Mountain, and Plan Your Trip. Underneath each one of these headers you'll find information to help you navigate our site and plan.
DISCOVER:
Underneath Discover you'll find information about Granite Peak such as our History, this blog, expansion plans, as well as a very new and exciting feature of our new website The Activities Guide & The Restaurant Guide. We've combed the area to list as many activities and dining options that you can filter to find various information you and your family might be interested in. It is our goal to provide you with as much detail and information within our website rather than have you use Google to find what you might be looking for.
ON-MOUNTAIN:
Here you'll find most of the information that pertains to our resort operation such as our trail map, daily lift & trail report, webcams as well as all of our products available for purchase in advance along with pages & links about our two non-profit partners - the Granite Peak Ski Patrol & the Granite Peak Ski Team - both of whom are an integral part of our organization!
PLAN YOUR TRIP:
I don't think I really need to go into too much detail here as the title explains itself but underneath here is our event calendar, activities guide, restaurant guide and other trip planning pages.
Updates to the Trail Map
If you navigate over to the Trail Map & Snow Report page you can download our updated trail map. You might notice a few changes from last year. The biggest two:
- WhiteWolf returns to a trail & Upper Dusky returns to a partial park.
- Our seven main glades - Tree Terrain areas are now labeled with names.
Why the changes?
A few reasons but namely safety. We did like having the park in the East. It spread out our parks a bit but it didn't come without challenges. Terrain parks require a good amount of snow to give the parks team ample amounts to create into their freestyle fun. As you all know White Wolf sits directly below the Cupid chairlift. Blasting snow over there coats Cupid in layers upon layers of snow and ice which then takes us time to de-ice, check etc. It's also not really good for the mechanics of the lift. Upper Dusky's fan guns are more powerful and also are in line with the lift so that any snow that is made up there will not land on the lift rather on the area we need it.
Ski Patrol's response to White Wolf was always great as we have patrol members skiing each area of the hill while we are open, but now having all of our parks within easy access to the Upper Patrol House - members of our team can respond quicker to any incident and also with the proper equipment.
We also have heard from many of our seasoned veterans that White Wolf is a skier favorite.
Those not wishing to ski the park will have Black Bear and skiers left of Upper Dusky to ski still while freestyle fanatics will have the skiers right into Sky High to showcase their skills with a great view from Comet.
To Infinity.....
We named the Tree Terrain again for better communication with our team in case of a response is necessary. These gladed areas have always been and they do have many names given to them by guests, patrol etc, but we'll be going by the seven glades when we report and discuss in the future. Our team will also be doing some clean up in many of these right before the season to get rid of any deadfall and or other obstructions.
The tree terrain furthest to the East is now named Berg's Boundary. This is a little nod to a the legendary Spike Berg. Spike was instrumental in teaching thousands of kids how to ski on Rib Mountain after he came back from WWII where he was a member and sergeant of the 10th Mountain Division.
In the West we created the name Beyond for the glade off of the Dasher Express. Now you can say to your kids - "Let's go to Infinity & Beyond" - just like Buzz Lightyear in the movie Toy Story. :)
I can't take credit for this one though. That idea came from a local young man and season passholder - Boden. Thanks buddy!