A question on numbers

I am looking for some rough numbers.  My patrol is shrinking, and I am curious how it sizes up. I know there are a bunch of vollies and pros on this forum.

I am curous about vollunteer patrol days versus skier visit days.

For example, it looks like my patrol (the volly end) will be 45 patrollers, at an average of 20 days each, for a total of 900 patrol days at a resort with 500,000 skier visits a year.  I took this year off, but I think there ar 15 or so on hill full timers.

Bonus question:  Any idea how many pt's a season?

Anybody got any rough numbers/guestimates?

hhtele

Given what I have seen on the east coast patrols,  45 volleys plus 15 full time patrollers is on the extreme low end for a resort with 500,000 visitors.  Even if you had 65 volleys and 15 full timers you probably still be below the average for that many skier visits.    On the other hand some resort have less injuries per number of skier visits. Resort near large metroplitan areas get a high number of newbies and never evers which can significantly increase the number of minor injuries. 

Wow! I agree with Catskills. 500k visits and the ratio of patrollers seems lean to me too.

The local hill I patrol at only had 75k (plus a few) visits this season, which is down from last year. We have 120+ patrollers, all volunteers. We are required to give ten duty days per season. We operate 7 days only through the Christmas/New Years break. Then it Wed-Sun. Night skiing only runs till mid-March.

And we stay busy.

Quote:

Originally Posted by FRDMFTR 

Wow! I agree with Catskills. 500k visits and the ratio of patrollers seems lean to me too.

 

The local hill I patrol at only had 75k (plus a few) visits this season, which is down from last year. We have 120+ patrollers, all volunteers. We are required to give ten duty days per season. We operate 7 days only through the Christmas/New Years break. Then it Wed-Sun. Night skiing only runs till mid-March.

 

And we stay busy.

Our patrol must be way over staffed - we have approx 60 patrollers to cover 10am to 10pm for about 100 days of skiing - don't want to venture a estimate on the number of guests. But its quite a bit under 500K !

 

I think there's a lot of variables to consider. Type of terrain and type of snow contribute to the amount of injuries, as does type of clientele. Busier resorts need more patrollers

Hours of operation, and day trip area/ resort determine need also. A resort will have more full-timers since they are busier M-F, and therefore need less vollies than a day trip area who can't cover the peak on the weekend. As night skiing will need more manpower from volunteers.

I volly at an east-coast hill near NYC. We have no night skiing,We do have some challenging terrain, and are a weekend/ daytrip area, doing probably 70% of our numbers on the weekends. I think I heard we do about 300k visits.

This year, we had 17 full/part-timers and 40 vollies. Vollies are required to do 24 weekend and holiday days, and we do not patrol when we ski M-F.

Here's some #s on skier visits for CO...