Our first week was a huge success, nothing like opening for April vacation week and being the only real attraction open mid-week.  The weather was great as well and it really gave us a great jumpstart.

This year we will be featuring a few new things.  There is a chance we might be finally getting close to opening the new cave we have been working on for the past couple of years, but until the rock work is finished we will not know for sure.  The next big thing is we are redoing the sugarhouse.  The past few years we have found that the gift shop sales were slipping and we felt that was because no one wanted to carry their purchases with them.  So, we moved all the jewelry and gifts to the main lodge and are planning to have the sugarhouse fit its name and will have a candy counter and other sweet treats.  The biggest sweet treats we are adding are Bavarian Nuts.  Wait till you try them, they are really addicting and the smell will draw you in, all the way from inside the caves.   To make this work we will also be adding a couple of air-conditioners to the sugar house as well.

The next change is to the Klondike Mines, we plan to go in and open up the room some, but we plan to leave the mines alone for now.  Last year the addition of the crystal mine was great.

We do have some plans at the sluice too, but it is still a little too early to give away our changes.  Let’s just we have been watching the Discovery Channel show “Gold Rush”.

As for new gifts in the shop, we have added a few new things, like we do each year, but you will need to come explore to see what we got, most of which still has not arrived, but UPS is stopping by daily.

As for me personally it has been a pretty good off-season.  Shortly after my wedding, my best friend of the past 10 years passed away, we knew it was coming, but it was still hard. Wiley, was always at my side and he was the best dog you could ever ask to have.  In January, we went to Hawaii for a honeymoon/vacation, it was everything we hoped and more, if we could pick up the mountain and the caves and move them to the islands we would never be back!  Shortly after we returned we went and picked up our new boy.  “Polar” puppy has been with us for a couple of months now and is quickly learning what it takes to be a good cave dog.

Thanks for reading and we look forward to your visit!

Fudge has been fun again this year.  We have some crazy flavors again this year.  We tried chocolate covered Pretzel , the salt was good, but the pretzels got soggy.  Currently we have a peanut butter banana mix that is pretty darn good and as fall approaches, I am sure we will try some pumpkin pie and apple combinations (not together).

Gift shops buying last year were pretty successful.  We are starting to see some of the more popular items disappear.  Of course with this economy some of the large priced gift shop items haven’t found the right person yet.  It just means we will not be buying those items next year.

Snack Bar-  This year we didn’t make too many changes, but did start carrying a line of sandwiches made fresh a couple of times a week from a local store.  We still have Kayem Hotdogs, our homemade pizza and basic nachos.  Was hoping to purchase warm pretzels this year, but the supplier never came through.

Slush- Last year we purchased a used slush machine.  Before buying it we were told that used machines are often worked hard and not going to last long, well they were right and early this summer it started to make ICE not slush, so we ordered a new one and finally now that the slush season is near the end the new one finally arrived and is up and running in the Klondike mine.

Klondike Mine.  We know that is attraction is really only fun for a certain age group and are forever working to try to improve it.  This year we turned one of the mines into a crystal mine and that has been pretty successful.

Caves-  Well not much changes up there, but this year during your visit you might here a some underground  construction noise.  We are working very hard on clearing out a new cave and hope that if all goes well we will have it open for 4^th of July next year.

Thanks for reading and we look forward to your visit!

-rob

(If you find grammatical errors in this blog, just realize I wrote it in 5 minutes, since I have been asked by 4 or 5 people in the past week to please update it! )