For winter 2008-09 Heavenly plans to debut two new trails in Ski Ways Glades, a popular tree-skiing area located on the border of California and Nevada, and one new trail in Powderbowl Woods on the California side.

Heavenly will also re-grade Skyline Trail, creating easier and faster access to Nevada from the top of Sky Express in California. Also, the West Coast’s largest snowmaking system is expanding onto Stagecoach run, increasing the amount of terrain Heavenly can cover with snowmaking to 75 percent.

New for 07/08  was the Olympic Express detachable-quad chairlift providing high-speed access to Olympic Downhill, three new trails and Nevada Woods – home to some of the best tree skiing in North America – ensuring guests more easily experience a part of the mountain that has been under-utilized due to the existing fixed-grip lift. Olympic Express also gives guests accessing the resort from Heavenly’s Stagecoach or Boulder Lodge a quicker route to Dipper Express, Comet Express and East Peak Lodge.

The Olympic Express will be 3,533 feet long with an 866-foot vertical rise. The high-speed lift will move 1,000 feet per minute with a 2,400 person capacity per hour. The former two-person Olympic chair ride took approximately 11 minutes, compared to just three-and-a-half minutes for the new Olympic Express, enabling more ski time and less time spent on a slow-moving chair.

Heavenly is opening three new trails off of Olympic Express:

• Cloud Nine is an intermediate-level groomed trail that is perfect for wide-open cruising. Heavenly strategically thinned the trees on the other two trails to offer different levels of tree-skiing experiences.
• The Pines is a groomed, intermediate-level trail that allows skiers and riders to cruise through a grove of beautiful fir trees.
• Bohemian Grove ratchets up the intensity one level. This advanced, gladed run is steeper, ungroomed and offers a more natural tree-skiing feel. For the expert skier or rider Nevada Woods is the all-natural, full-tilt tree skiing that made this area a local legend.

A fourth trail, called Nova, is an intermediate-level trail that will run along the Dipper Express chair line to connect Orion to the base of Dipper Express, bypassing the bottom of Orion and the guests heading to Comet Express and East Peak Lodge. The four new trails give Heavenly a total of 95 runs.

Also new this winter will be the Heavenly Sky Flyer at Adventure Peak. This elevated zip line cable ride will take guests on a 50-mile-an-hour thrill ride from the top of Tamarack Express back to the top of the Gondola, a vertical drop of 525 feet. At 3,100 feet, the Heavenly Sky Flyer will be the longest zip line in the lower 48 U.S. states.