With all of the recent warmups and talk of how this is eating into revenues at the ski resorts, I started thinking about how Timberline is holding up in such an awful winter. Mainly because it's one of my favorite resorts and try to get there as much as possible. Anyhow I started wondering, what would be a low cost option to increase revenues to help against such bad winters?

Well this got me thinking back to another topic on here regarding everyone's ideal upgrades at Timberline. While we all would really like a lift upgrade and snowmaking upgrades, we all can agree that T-Line is surviving OK with what they have at the moment. But what stood out to me is there extremely limited lit trails at night. While this may not affect the experienced skiers and boarders on here, but we all know that beginners and intermediates make up the vast majority of ticket purchases.

Trails like Salamander (yes I've heard about the national forrest restrictions), Off the Wall, and The Drop would attract more ticket sales from 4pm-9pm in my opinion. As well as Winterset, the terrain park, Lower Almost Heaven, etc would be a draw to beginners. When I'm at Wisp their crowds don't fade away after 4pm, in fact that seems to be some of their peak times till around 8 when crowds fade a bit. It feels like to me when I was a beginner that Timberline is a day only place because at night, riding the same little one trail over and over again got so boring that it felt like it was a huge waste of money at the time.

With that said, anyone have an idea how much it would cost to light all trails at Timberline? I'm not counting the controversy over Upper Salamander in whether the national forrest will or will not permit lighting. But that aside, the big costs are labor obviously, but installing poles and the lighting units. Running PVC pipes and electric cables. I can't imagine that the cost would be more than snowmaking upgrades.