Salt City Slopes Get Ready for Ski Season

November 12th- An early season October snowfall brought skiers out to the Syracuse slopes. Now that the snow is gone, one Salt City ski mountain is using the nice weather to get its trails ready for an early December opening.

Toggenburg Ski Resort in Fabius opened briefly in October to accommodate the skiers who wanted to get back on the slopes before Halloween. The snow quickly melted, leaving the mountain bare and without the equipment needed to make the white stuff.

Just over two weeks later, Toggenburg employee Erich Sparks says it has been a tremendous amount of work to get the mountain ready.

"The past couple weeks here we've done more than I've ever worked before," says Sparks, "It's a lot work."

The Toggenburg maintenance crew has needed to take full advantage of the nice weather in order to install the snow making system.

"It's not too warm, it's not cool," says Sparks, "If there's snow on the hill, it's hard to get the sleds up. If it's raining, it's really hard to get them up."

The sleds Sparks is referring to are used to hold together the snow making system that will drop over a foot of snow on the trails. Employees have to attach each sled to an ATV and pull it up to the highest point on the slopes where it will be put into place.

The snow making system is the last portion of the slopes that needs to be put into place for the ski mountain to be functioning. Sparks says the mountain should be ready to go within a week after Thanksgiving.

As stated in the video, I rode in the bed of a pickup truck to get up and down the mountain. I continued shooting the majority of the time. Below is my attempt to shoot another stand-up on the way down the mountain.

This second extra video is fairly raw footage of the ride up the mountain from the bed of a pickup truck.