It’s time to dust off your skis, boards, boots and goggles for Marmot Basin’s opening day, set for next Friday.

Brian Rode, vice-president of marketing and sales, said the mountain will “likely” be up and running – leaving room for an unfortunate turn of luck. But he also said he’s confident everything is on track for at least the Eagle Express Chair and five runs to be open on Nov. 11.

“Things are shaping up nicely for opening,” he said. “We’re making snow all during the night and for a chunk of the day until it gets too warm. 

“We will have enough snow to open with at least five runs in the lower area on opening day.”

Once the upper levels of the mountain have more snow, skiers and boarders will have a nice surprise this year, a new high-speed quad chair and a new chair lift to replace the old School House T-Bar.

Rode said the replacement of the T-Bar was a necessary improvement because School House is a run used for teaching beginner and novice skiers and boarders.

“The problem with the T-Bar is it’s hard to ride if you’re a beginner,” he said.

“So everybody who is starting out skiing or snowboarding – or maybe they’ve skied or snowboarded a little bit, but they’re still a novice, and they’re trying to improve – the slope was perfect, but a T-Bar is difficult to ride up until you’ve got your balance, because you’ve got to balance on your feet.

“With a chair lift, now you’ve got no problems, everyone’s gonna get to the top of that School House run, so it will be way, way, way more user friendly for novice skiers to ride up the lift.”

The other new lift, the Paradise high-speed quad chair, replaces the original Paradise Triple Chair in the upper area of the mountain. The new high-speed chair carries skiers and boarders 1.45 kilometres in 4.6 minutes and can move 2,400 people per hour.

Rode said that’s almost twice as fast as the old chair and it’s even 71 per cent longer.

The price tag for the two replacements fell just shy of $7 million, and has come only two years after Marmot installed the Canadian Rockies Express high-speed quad, the longest high-speed quad chair in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, taking skiers and boarders up 1,955 vertical feet.

Marmot has spent more than $25 million in capital improvements in the ski area since 2003, when a new group of shareholders assumed ownership of the mountain.

Rode said the result of all of these new lifts and improvements is a better mountain experience.

“For the skier it means spending less time waiting in line and way less time riding ski lifts, and they’re spending more time doing what they came and paid their money for, that’s skiing and snowboarding.”

Although there has been a lot of construction on the mountain, there are actually fewer lifts now than there were three years ago.

“We’ve gone from nine lifts down to seven lifts, so we’ve increased our uphill capacity – how many people we can actually transport per hour – we’ve increased the efficiency, so there’s less ride time, but we’ve reduced the number of lifts on the mountain, so there’s an environmental gain,” he said.

Rode said the improvements at Marmot also benefit the community, especially since a snow-making machine was installed five years ago, allowing the mountain to stay open for six months of the year. 

“We’ll open on Nov. 11, whereas prior to snow making, often we wouldn’t get open until early December, sometimes mid-December. It’s getting us open a month earlier. 

“So we’ve kind of given people a reason to come here in November.”

For updates on the snow and opening day, check the website at www.skimarmot.com