This is my first season at Vail mountain and I am running a snow-cat. I mostly run a Prinoth 350 but I also have ran a Prinoth Bison and a Pisten Bully 300. I is a lot of fun and I can ski for free at the mountains Vail owns.:drinkup There will be more pictures and possibly some videos to come.:waving
Right on man! :drinkup I like the Bisons, however I feel the blade is just a tad too aggressive. Roll the bite out of the blade and you're still just hammering out a wad of snow. Conversely, they will push a bunch of snow. I do like the fact that Prinoth went back to Recaro, I HATE the air ride seats in the Camoplast 350's and Bombi 350's. Other than that, the 350's are pretty good cats. I spent last night running our 350 winch just free catting around. However, early in the shift I took our 275 out to a winch spot, buried the blade, and one of the other guys I work with opened up a run with the winch, I was hosed that I left my camera at home because that would have been awesome footage. Once we finished I grabbed the winch for the rest of the shift. Vail seems to have their stuff together, you guys have decent mechanics? That's the only thing I've noticed where I'm working, we get any serious problems with these cats and our in house mechanics sometimes can't figure them out quick enough to have the cat running the next shift. The Prinoths they can usually fix, but we have one PB Edge that is 3 years old and has had problems since day 1 I'm told. Seems like the boys from PB are always having to come up and screw with it, everyone says we just got unlucky and have a lemon. But those are sick cats when they run correctly, dare I say even better than Prinoth. Haha. I'm going to try to score more pictures and hopefully video as well, we'll see how that goes. Keep the photos coming along and welcome aboard!
Thanks man. Yea, the Bison blade is really aggressive. Thats cool that you got to see a winch run, I dont have time to. Our mechanics are awsome, they get machines running in no time except when it comes to the PB 600s. Yea I made a video a while ago of me running a 300 at the beginning of the season track packing. I am working on getting more photos. Later.
Here is the video that I talked about in my last post here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtHrtafUgf0
Yeah the chance to go out in the winch was the "right place at the right time' kind of deal. I was running the only cat we can anchor the winch to, so I got lucky. How are the PB 600's? They just look so gigantic and overkill for most places. We figured a 400 would be a good frontline cat for our hill, even the Bisons are enough. We're still kinda in the stone age with that little 275 we have. Good cat, but slow as hell compared to the 350's and Bisons, get's stuck more often and the tiller bounces and hops over hard snow like crazy no matter what you do to adjust the tiller. Our mechanics are alright, but there's always room for improvement. The first couple weeks we only had 7 out of 9 cats running, now we're up to a full fleet finally. Hopefully nobody breaks anything and we keep the ball rolling. Bummer on the steering wheel on that PB, I don't think I would like the wheel at all. I like being able to control each track.
The 600 is cool...really big, heavy, lots of buttons and a big touch screen display. Yea i like controlling each track too. I was out two nights ago and some moron slid off a cat-walk sideways it was the funniest thing i have seen so far. I took some pictures.:Banghead
Holy crap! He buried that damn PB! One of our new guys was out in our winch cat 1 night free catting and he buried it up to the door. I just don't know how people think hammering the sticks when you get in trouble will ever get you out of it. There is a fine line though, sometimes you can get away with a quick speed up and you'll walk out of problems, most of the time you won't. How did he slide off that bank? The pass above is not even pitched that way it looks like. Looks like maybe it was soft and he hammered it because that outside track started spinning and he spun it right over the bank. He got lucky he wasn't somewhere real nasty, we have one place on the mountain where there is a huge bowl and we groom around it all the way to the edge. Right now, we don't have a lot of snow, eventually we'll wing snow into it and start filling it up. Right now, the first 5-6 feet on 1 side is vertical, then it mellows to maybe 40 degrees and continues down for about 25 feet, If you slide off that, no doubt the cat would roll.
He was backing down the catwalk dropped the right track off the catwalk a little. He then tried to go forward, right track started spinning and dug into the side and the edge broke away and he slid down the side. That would suck to slide down the angle and yea you probably would end up rolling your cat. I went skiing today in Game Creek Bowl at Vail and one of the supervisors left a turn mark on skiers left.
One of my supervisors has his old Tucker snow cat at Vail for a couple of days for ski safety week i took some videos and pictures. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92hxg5qOZ6o http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40b6QB1o6_M
Oh yeah, once you're stuck, trying to hammer going uphill is never a good plan, only gets you stuck more. If you can back down, do that. If not, call the winch to pull you out. Haha. Leaving track marks is no good, sometimes it's really tough not to. We haven't had ANY new snow in 2 weeks. It warmed up, rained 13 some inches, stayed warm for a few days after the rain, now it's finally back down to freezing all day and night. We're on boilerplate right now, blades on 350's will not break through whatsoever. I'm running a 350 every night, the boys in the Bisons have a little better blade for the ice, however I feel the Bison blade is a little aggressive for most conditions but seems to be the ticket for ice. I'll admit I left some track marks last night but only in 1 spot and I know exactly where they are to pick them up tonight. I felt bad and wanted to make another pass but we started the night down 1 cat, then 2, then we lost another before the shift was over. I was going for broke by myself finishing a section of the hill another guy had started before his cat blew a u-joint in the tiller. Had it been any other night I would've spent another 15 minutes making another pass to grab them but in all honesty they weren't too bad, I'm just a perfectionist. Haha Sweet old Tucker! Those things are badass, I wish I had one to bomb around in on my days off.
I know a guy who pulled the track off of one of those Tuckers and put 35's on it. It has a Jeep lug pattern. I wish I had pics.
Cool pics!