 |
| The 2023/2024 downhill day trips season came to an end on Saturday, March 23 at MSLM. It was a great way to wrap up the season with a surprise cold week with some snow in Toronto and the ski resorts. A huge thank you to the volunteer downhill day trips team! On a weekly basis, these are your volunteers who worked hard behind the scenes. We had 53 day trips planned for this season, and this team did all the work to coordinate them, even for the trips that didn’t run. Saturday Trip Coordinator: Bishu Basuroy Sunday Trip Coordinator: Michael Hardtke Monday Trip Coordinator: Sheila Moshonas Wednesday Trip Coordinator: Fran Burgess Day Trips email inquiries: Jason Tsang Bus Captain forms: Heidi Gay Thank you to all club members who volunteered to be bus captains on all our day trips! Thank you to Downhill Snow School and all instructors for organizing, teaching lessons and clinics, as well as the MSLM race series! We had an unseasonably warm winter, but we still got quite a few weeks of trips with full registrations. I’m already looking forward to next season and hoping for a lot more snow and winter! |
Mogul Masters Clinics!
 |
| The One Day Mogul Masters clinics are back. The dates are Saturday, February 24 and March 2 at MSLM and Monday, February 26 and Sunday, March 10 at Blue Mountain. For more information visit the Downhill Ski School page. For registration go to the registration page on the HPSC website. *Important* Click the Mogul Masters option not your step level. |
Sign Up for Downhill Day Trips!
All February day trip registrations are now open for the bus. Drive-up options will continue to be opened on a weekly basis on Saturdays by 7:30pm.
Be on the look-out for the confirmation of:
- A downhill day trip on Family Day Monday, February 19th
- An extended après-ski social at Mount St. Louis Moonstone on Saturday, February 24th
There’s still lots of winter left, let’s get out to the hills!
Downhill day trips need bus captains!
We cannot run bus trips without bus captains. There’s a fun way to meet new members, help run day trips and cover the cost of your next bus trip, $35 in savings!
Day trips bus captains help lead our Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Wednesday trips. Bus captains are responsible for preparing and delivering bus announcements on the day trip, taking attendance, answering member questions, handing out lift tickets and completing end of day paperwork to be submitted to the Director of Downhill Day Trips.
Bus captains receive 1 bus voucher for every trip they captain (value of $35).
Please attend an upcoming Zoom call to find out more information and to get some basic training on Thursday, February 1st, 8:00-9:00 pm.
Please email daytrips@hpsc.ca to register.
IMPORTANT Update for Downhill Day Trips Drive-ups
Starting this season, Drive-up registrations will be opening on a weekly basis. Every Saturday by 8 pm, drive-up registration for all day trips will open for the following week.
A great benefit of being a member of HPSC is that you don’t have to be on the bus in order to take advantage of our free lessons. To ensure the best possible experience, we require drive-ups to register for their lesson. To manage class sizes and the number of instructors, we need to restrict the number of drive-up spots. The snow school and our day trips teams monitor the numbers closely leading up to the registration deadline and open up additional drive-up spots based on the numbers on the bus. These additional spots are first offered to those on the drive-up waitlist.
When a member “no shows” it means that others who may have wanted a lesson are not able to participate and we may have more instructors than necessary, which costs the club since we have paid for transportation and partially subsidised instructor lift tickets.
Over the last couple of seasons, the limited number of drive-up spots were booked up very quickly weeks in advance. However, since there is no financial commitment (unlike booking the bus) or penalty, there is a higher number of drive-up no-shows.
Starting this season, to hopefully reduce the no-show rate, we are opening drive-up registration only in the week prior to the trip, so you have a better idea of your schedule and the weather. This means that drive-up registration for all day trips will now open on the previous Saturday evening and remain open until the regular deadline, Tuesday by 6 pm. Further, to reduce the work for our refund team that handles cancellations, since there is no refund involved, we are allowing drive-up registrants to self-cancel up until the standard registration deadline.
IMPORTANT update for Downhill Day Trips Drive-ups:
| Starting this season, Drive-up registrations will be opening on a weekly basis. A great benefit of being a member of HPSC is that you don’t have to be on the bus in order to take advantage of our free lessons. To ensure the best possible experience, we require drive-ups to register for their lesson. To manage class sizes and the number of instructors, we need to restrict the number of drive-up spots. The snow school and our day trips teams monitor the numbers closely leading up to the registration deadline and open up additional drive-up spots based on the numbers on the bus. These additional spots are first offered to those on the drive-up waitlist. When a member “no shows”, it means that others who may have wanted a lesson are not able to participate and we may have more instructors than necessary, which costs the club since we have paid transportation and partially subsidised instructor lift tickets. Over the last couple of seasons, the limited number of drive-up spots were booked up very quickly weeks in advance. However, since there is no financial commitment (unlike booking the bus) or penalty, there is a higher number of drive-up no-shows. Starting this season, to hopefully reduce the no-show rate, we are opening drive-up registration only in the week prior to the trip, so you have a better idea of your schedule and the weather. This means that drive-up registration for all day trips will now open on the previous Saturday evening and remain open until the regular deadline, Tuesday by 6 pm. Further, to reduce the work for our refund team that handles cancellations, since there is no refund involved, we are allowing drive-up registrants to self-cancel up until the standard registration deadline. For the first week of January trips, drive-up registration will open on Saturday, December 30. |
Downhill Day Trips
| Registration for day trips on December 16th and 17th are now open! Please register at: https://hpsc.ca/downhill-trip-registration-page There will be NO LESSONS on both days. All instructors are training in Mont Tremblant that weekend. January day trips will be open for registration before the holidays. Exact date will be announced on the next SnowBiz. Our awesome volunteer, Lisa Zielger, is creating each and every registration module. For just the month of January, there are 64 registration modules! Please be patient, the day trips team will open registrations as soon as we can. We also can’t wait to register for day trips in snowy January! |
Ikon Pass Group Sale Extended!
Good news for any Ikon Pass procrastinators! Our Group Sale agreement (with our partner Skican) has been extended to May 5th!
If you are hesitant because you are recovering from an injury, or because you are worried you may not otherwise be able to use the pass next year, Ikon has a few different types of insurance:
Adventure Assurance lets you defer the value of your pass to the following year, so long as you defer before December 14, 2023. And it’s free and included with your pass purchase!
Pass Protection and Injury Insurance are also available. See link here for details.
Insurance is not available directly through the Group Sale. The Spot Insurance will need to be purchased directly with Ikon by calling their Customer Support Center at 888-365-IKON after you’ve purchased your pass through Skican. This can be done anytime before October 31 2023.
For further information or to participate in the Group Sale, contact Russ Harding at ikon@hpsc.ca.
Downhill day trips are officially finished for the 2022/2023 season
Thanks to all club members, instructors and new friends that came out to one of 51 scheduled day trips this season. Unfortunately we didn’t have enough interest to run our two bonus April Saturday trips to MSLM.
A huge thanks to all the hard work by our day trips coordinators, Michael Hardtke, Bishu Basuroy, Sheila Tolentino-Moshonas and Fran Burgess. They each put in hours of work before and after every day trip to make them happen.
Thank you also to the following volunteers for their huge contributions:
Lisa Ziegler for creating all the downhill registration modules. Yes! She set up all 102 registration modules (bus & drive-ups)!
Jason Tsang for taking charge of the day trips emails and coordinating all our lift tickets every Saturday for Mount St. Louis Moonstone.
David Manning, Christine Bellerose and Snow School for getting so many awesome instructors for each day trip. Our members love every ski and snowboard lesson. Thank you to all HPSC instructors!
Hilary Childs for your work with processing all trip cancellations and refunds.
And finally, thank you to all our amazing bus captains that made each trip experience smooth for all our members and guests: Andrea Palmay, Heidi Gay, David Flowers, Suzanne de Grandpré, Celeste O’Neil, Kim Wiebe, Rocco Romeo, Martha Wright, Ron Maruska, and Jen Beatty.
It’s now time to enjoy some warm weather in the off season. I’m already looking forward to when the snow and cold will return!
Amy Lam
Downhill Day Trips Director
Bringing a guest? Here’s how to register them:
On some trips, members are allowed to bring a guest. Guests are allowed to come ONCE per season (even if they know multiple members) and members can bring one guest per trip. If people are keen to ski with us, we encourage them to join. The club is only able to run because of its membership-based structure. But guest days are a good chance for people to try us out.
Registering you and your guest happens separately. First, register yourself on the trip. Then, when guest registration is available (typically the last day of trip registration), you can register your guest. Find the trip registration module again and click “Register”. On the next screen click the “New Registration” button. The next page will show the email associated with your account. If it is filled in, click “Next” (if not, fill it in with the email you used to sign up for the club and click “Next”). Then you can choose “Guest” and proceed with registration and payment. Essentially, you are just registering that you are bringing a guest; there is no place where you actually put in their name or other identifying information.
You pay for your guest and your guest pays you back. Remember that you are responsible for ensuring that your guest follows the policies and procedures of the club. You must also ensure that your guest brings a signed copy of our waiver (link to it), or you must bring it for them to sign on the bus. No waiver means they will be denied participation.