mt. Bachelor’s Price Increases

I'm going to date myself here, but I've been skiing at Mt. Bachelor since 1977. Back then an adult day ticket was $12 and a child day ticket was $9. I consider Mt. Bachelor home and I am happy I'm able to give my 7 year old daughter the same skiing opportunities I had growing up on my home mountain.

I’ve got to say though that I’m extremely disappointed with the season pass price increases. First of all what’s up with a youth's 10-day pass costing more than a youth season pass? Just curious! Also $929, for an adult season pass if you buy before Oct 1^st, even after the sharp decline in customer service on the mountain over the past couple of years.

Since Powder Corp. took ownership a few years back the quality of Mt Bachelor has been in steep decline. The brand new lifts break down frequently; the ticket turn-stiles don’t function half of the time; the lift attendants don’t pay close enough attention to safety; the food is horrible (an expensive hamburger that tastes like cardboard and is put together with the cheapest quality ingredients Mt. Bachelor can buy); the runs aren’t groomed at the level they were during Mt. Bachelor’s great days; and finally the parking lot is not plowed when you arrive in the morning to ski.

Maybe I was just spoiled all of those grand years skiing on a great, well maintained mountain BPC (before Powder Corp.). I just find it interesting that Mt. Bachelor is asking us to fork over even more money when we continue to see declines in the quality of Mt. Bachelor’s services. They have not proved to me that by increasing their fees they are going to increase our customer service. So far it has proved to be the opposite.

Because I still love skiing and I want to see if Matt Janney will be able to return Mt Bachelor’s great image and high quality services, I will be paying the increased fees for season passes for my daughter and me. I know Matt Janney remembers the good old days and wants Mt. Bachelor to be a high class skiing destination. I guess all I can do at this point is have faith that he can do that.

Mt Bachelor 2007-2008 Season Pass Prices

Related Bend Bulletin articles:
A history in Bend, a future at Bachelor
Mt. Bachelor raises its prices

As a side note, does anyone remember the warm homemade donuts Mt Bachelor used to provide at the main lodge? I think Matt Janney should bring them back :)

frazier Museum

While on our Wildhorse Resort & Casino weekend trip we found ourselves near the town of Milton-Freewater which just happened to be where my grandmother and great-grandfather's family was from. While in Milton-Freewater we found and visited the Frazier Museum. I had been told about the Frazier Museum by my cousin's wife, Charlotte, who has been a great source of our family genealogical research. The museum contains quite a bit of information about my family's history. While at the museum we talked to the director at length and had a great time learning of my family history. We were able to view a large collection of pictures and documents about my great-great grandmother, Eva Alvina Beardsley, and all of her descendants including my father, grandmother, aunts and uncle, etc. I was even able to view information about my great-great grandfather, Ralph Maxon Wood, who married Eva. He was the first baby born in Fort Walla Walla and one of my distant cousins still has the silver baby cup he received from the General of the fort at the time.

I would have to say one of the most fascinating things I saw at the museum was a collection of letters written by a great...great?? uncle during the civil war to his sister. He did not live through the civil war due to a shot to the knee, but the letters he wrote were very beautiful and eloquent. It is amazing what our ancestors had to endure. We are so fortunate!

Frazier Farmstead Museum, Milton-Freewater

wildhorse Weekend

We have such great friends! This past weekend we were lucky enough to tag along with them on their RV / golf trip to the Wildhorse Resort and Casino outside Pendleton, OR. We had a wonderful time eating, golfing, eating, swimming, eating, visiting and did I say eating. I've got to say the new restaurant, Plateau, located in the casino is excellent. The 10 of us showed up Friday evening and were escorted to the private dining room where we enjoyed a wonderful meal including drinks and dessert at very reasonable prices. The service was top notch! Betty, our server, you rock and my husband, Scot, thinks you make the best Gibson on the planet. The dessert was so good we returned Saturday evening to partake in a sweet feast once again. My daughter felt that the hot chocolate lava cake was the best. The bananas with rum sauce smothered over the hot chocolate lava cake were my favorite. A few of our friends had the special on Friday evening. A baked peach that was supposedly to die for. The only disappointment I heard the whole time was when we returned Saturday and they did not have the baked peach available for dessert. I thought my friend was going to cry.

The Wildhorse golf course was pretty nice. I couldn't hit my irons worth a darn, so I lost a couple of balls in the lakes with my perfect left hook. My husband, daughter and I played best ball though so the score did not reflect how badly I played because my family kept bailing me out. We were able to see our friends that moved to Milton Freewater a couple of years ago. He is an awesome golfer who just this last year hit two hole-in-ones during the same game with the same ball. How awesome is that?

Scot on 2nd hole Wildhorse golf course Pendleton, OR.
The hole-in-one guru Wildhorse golf course Pendleton, OR.

360Flex Seattle

I just returned from the 360Flex Conference in Seattle. It was fun and I learned a few things. A couple of the main themes in the sessions were teaching developers how to be designers and how'd they do that? I would have to say my two favorite sessions were Programmatic Visualization by Andrew Trice where he had great examples of using the drawing API inside Flex and Flex and Ruby by Simeon Bateman where he demonstrated how to set up a Ruby on Rails dataset and access it using RemoteObject in Flex. You can find more information from these two great presenters on their blogs: Andrew Trice and Simeon Bateman - The simFluence.

I plan to use the Flex drawing API in my new reporting / mapping application where I need to develop a measuring tool for my map. I also plan to learn Ruby on Rails as soon as I can because it seems like a great, easy tool to set up datasets for use inside Flex.

The one topic I really would have liked to see a session about was how to develop an application in AIR for use offline. Maybe using some SQLLite examples, XML examples, etc. This is a topic I'm extremely interested in and there doesn't seem to be many examples out there yet, so I was hoping there would be a presentation at the conference on this.

Finally I also was able to fit in a few fun things while I was visiting Seattle. It was my first stay in Seattle even though I'm a native Northwesterner. I wish I would have traveled there before because it is a really fun city to visit. I highly recommend seeing a Mariners game in Safeco field. It is a beautiful field and there's nothing better than a baseball game (except maybe a Packers game in Lambeau field). We went to the Monday night game where they beat the Minnesota Twins in the bottom of the 9th with a homerun. Awesome!!!

I also did a few touristy trips, such as visiting Pikes Place Market. Seattle is celebrating the markets 100th birthday with Centennial days. I took a couple hours to visit Seattle Center where I saw the Space Needle and visited the Experience Music Project (EMP) and the Science Fiction Museum. I loved the Northwest section of the EMP where there were music items from the grunge era in the 1990's. The song writings by Kurt Cobain for a Nirvana song were very cool! If you're a sci-fi fan like I am you'll enjoy the Science Fiction Museum with all of it's cool movie costumes and props including the wicked witches hat from the Wizard of Oz, Arnold Schwarzenegger's leather jacket from Terminator, Darth Vader's costume from the Star Wars movies and all the Star Trek props and costumes you could imagine. It was all a lot of fun!

the Modern Day Treasure Hunt

Have you heard of geocaching? According to www.geocaching.com the definition of geocaching is...
" Geocaching is an entertaining adventure game for gps users. Participating in a cache hunt is a good way to take advantage of the wonderful features and capability of a gps unit. The basic idea is to have individuals and organizations set up caches all over the world and share the locations of these caches on the internet. GPS users can then use the location coordinates to find the caches. Once found, a cache may provide the visitor with a wide variety of rewards. All the visitor is asked to do is if they get something they should try to leave something for the cache."
In other words geocaching is a modern day treasure hunt. I've got to say that I'm becoming increasingly addicted to it. I went on a geocache last summer with some friends and my daughter and instantly fell in love with this activity. Every camping trip we've been on this summer I've been geocaching. I've found caches in Ocean Shores WA, Metolius OR, Crescent Lake OR and Paulina Lake OR. I'm planning on placing my first cache in the Dry Canyon in Redmond soon. There are also hundreds of caches around town ready to be found.

It is a great way to get my 7 year old daughter interested in hiking and the outdoors and my new westie puppy loves the chance to get out on long walks. I highly recommend it! To find out more visit www.geocaching.com. You can search for the location of geocaches all over the world. Have fun, I am!
As a side note I'm trying to find a local geocache group here in Central Oregon. From what I've heard there is only an informal group. If anyone knows how to contact them, please let me know.