Jay Peak Issues Serious Warning To Uphill Travelers

Jet and Haynes are winch territory which poses the threat of serious injury or death to persons who come into contact with the cable. The cable may not always be visible and can be buried in the snow and hard to detect, and the groomer can be up to 3000 feet away.

Officials at Jay Peak wrote, "Groomers work through the night and early hours of the morning. The last thing our grooming staff needs to worry about is seeing you through a cloud of snow. It's their hill at night and in the early morning hours. Please be respectful and stay off of it during their time."

A groomer and winch operator for 34 years wrote, "I have had close calls with people hiking /skinning and skiing at night and have crossed the cable and enter the zone of the cable there’s nothing worse than another operator seeing head lamps enter the zone and he radios me to tell me he see them from afar. Glad to see Jay is putting the word out it’s real stay safe beware of signage." 

Jay Peak is far from the first resort to issue this type of warning. Even just limited to Vermont, resorts such as Stowe Mountain, for example, have told skiers the same thing. 

Stowe Mountain Rescue got serious, issuing a message to those who skinned up Mt. Mansfield for a pre-dawn descent that took them dangerously close to the resort’s winch cat groomers, an incident that reportedly caused the resort to shut down its snowmaking operations for the day.

“This is a pressing safety issue,” the mountain rescue group, a branch of the town’s public safety department, wrote on its social media channels on December 4th. 

In other words, we all need to treat each other with respect. If we want to use the resort for our own adventures, we need to give the resort teams the space to do their jobs without us skiing on their winch cables.