i understand what your saying, and I understand that many people dont understand what it takes to get such a feature set up, so heres what it takes. The ammount of snow that it takes to properly install something like the olive battle ship middle sections takes a snow depth of aprox 3 feet, then the rail is about 4 feet more out of the ground after that. Oviously we cant have a rail that is simply 7 feet tall because the only snow used to put it in is around the legs, so we have to build a table of snow to properly accomidate it. Last year we used a roller that from the dirt up was about 5 feet deep by 15 feet wide by 24 feet long. Thats 24x15x5, thats 1800 cubic feet of snow, thats 50 970L of snow that we have to make to propery install the rail. Under perfect snow making conditions that is aprox. 40 minutes of time put in just to blow the snow. To make snow costaprox $0.025/L (last time I had a rough estimate given to me), so thats $1269.75 alone just for the snow. Then theres the cat time to get the snow to the place that we cant it, so lets say that takes about 20 mins. To operate a cat costs around 500/h, so thats another 100 bucks. Then we have to get the feature to the location, so in the case of the olive bar we just got 4 guys and used straight man power to get it up the hill, dig the holes for the legs, build the kicker, re-attach the inserts, rake the landing, and actually install the rail into the ground. Only 3 of those guys were getting paid at the time so and all of that took about 3 hours when all was said and done. So thats another 100 bucks added to the tab.
So cash wish to get that single feature in it took 4h and $1469.75, all of that is under best case senarios that we were lucky enough to have last season.
Im not trying to make myself or any of our park crew sound like gods, or the end all of the hill, but for some of you guys who think that park crew is all fun and games, in the future think about all the time spent getting those features ready for you to ride.