Cleanup, repairs continue at Marble Mountain
Steady Brook ski resort should reopen on Friday
STEADY BROOK — Richard Wells felt a lot better on Tuesday, Feb. 27, than he did just two days before when a washout poured down over part of Marble Mountain and dragged approximately 600 tonnes of dirt with it.
“It’ll be nothing more than a good story here after a couple of days,” Wells, the general manager of the ski resort, told Saltwire.
After making good progress with cleaning up the mess left behind and moving snow around, Marble Mountain should be open on Friday, March 1, Wells said.
In anticipation of the heavy rain that had been forecast for last weekend, Wells sent a crew out on Friday, Feb. 23, to clear catch basins and culverts.
By day’s end they thought they were ready, but Mother Nature had other plans.
“Water just finds its way downhill however it wants to,” said Wells.
Wells said it may not be the main cause, but there is a bit of holding pond above the Lightning Express chairlift which let go and combined with the over 40 milimetres of constant rainfall that fell Saturday, Feb. 24.
Normally, all the water runoff gets pitched to a catch basin between the OMJ and Marble Shute.
Instead, the water diverted and on Sunday, Feb. 25, a river opened and flowed down the Musgrave underneath the Lightning Express chairlift.
“There was trenches there eight, 10 feet deep. All of that silt, and mud and rock content that was getting swept down in that trench basically got deposited right in front of our terminal building (for the chairlift) in a pool that was about 30 feet deep,” he said.
“Sunday when we woke up it was like, good God is our season over.”
With help from JCL Construction, the ski resort’s snowclearing partners, they’ve been able to move that dirt and get things back on track, Wells said.
On Monday, Feb. 26, some work was completed on the Musgrave. Wells said there was two feet of man-made snow on Marble Shute and the two groomers scraped what they could and pushed it into holes on the Musgrave.
They’ll continue to move snow in from wherever they can find it and once the season ends and the snow is gone, they’ll be able to do some preventative maintenance on the hill.
Wells said the rest of the mountain was pretty much saved from any damage and he sees a silver lining in what happened.
“If there’s a saving grace here of all the water and silt that we’re removing, it could have ended up down in our rental building and if that was the case, we actually would have lost the entire building,” he said.
Marble had been closed on Saturday in anticipation of the weather and remained closed on Sunday. Wells said that meant the cancellation of some weekend programs, including a Fat Bike Festival.
With the continued closure, a school group from central Newfoundland had to reschedule its visit.
A conference at the resort on Thursday, Feb. 29, will go ahead as scheduled The Western Sno-riders Race on the Rock, scheduled for later in March, is expected to go ahead.
When the hill does reopen, some ungroomed areas won’t be skiable because it has a layer of ice, Wells said.
For safety reasons, the ungroomed terrain needs about 15 to 20 centimetres of snow before it can be opened.
This is not the first time something like this has happened at the ski hill.
Almost six years ago, when Corner Brook hosted Hockey Day in Canada, Marble Mountain experienced almost the same scenario as it did on Sunday, Wells said.
“At that point we beefed up the culverts and changed the path of water as to how it reworked itself.”
As for the cost of the current damage and repairs, Wells said he expects to have more information about that in the next week or so.