~ Morgan Hua ~

The NSC year ends May 31.  If you renew your membership before May 31, there’s a $5 discount and membership will only be $25 instead of $30.  This membership fee covers the club’s fixed costs such as website hosting, insurance costs, storage of equipment, and other incidental costs.  According to the NSC Treasurer, the membership fee just about covers those costs.

The club had a difficult year due to bad snow conditions.  The weekend bus trip and the Mammoth bus trip were both less than half full.  The week long trip was still a success and is one of the mainstays of our club.

Here are some changes to the club for the coming year:

1. Because we lost so much money on the bus trips last year, we decided to have “at most” one bus trip next year and if that loses money, we will discontinue bus trips in the future.  The cost of the bus trips are beginning to approach the price of a plane flight, so we may offer weekend flights to out of state ski destinations such as Utah.  Fly out, ski two days, fly home, and go back to work on Monday — all for about the price of our bus trip.

2. No more hardcopies of the newsletter will be produced.  We were only sending hardcopies to eight people and six of those people have access to the internet.  The hardcopies required writing two versions of the newsletter:  one for the website and a pdf version which was printed.  Not producing the hardcopies removes the need to generate a pdf version of the newsletter.  On the website, you can see all the published articles here:  https://www.niseiskiclub.org/archives/archives/

3. No more pdfs of the newsletter will be produced.  See above.

4. NSC might not participate at Nikkei Matsuri.  We skipped Nikkei Matsuri this year and then to our dismay, we found out that the organizers of Nikkei Matsuri awarded the “Chinese Chicken Salad” booth to the Boy Scouts.  According to the Nikkei Matsuri organizers, the Boy Scouts will have the “Chinese Chicken Salad” concession until they give it up.  The good news is that since we’re not working Nikkei Matsuri, we aren’t using the Mt View Buddhist Temple’s kitchens for prep work, so we’re not on the hook for helping with the Mt View Obon.

5. NSC members may request copies of the annual treasurer report.  Just contact a board member and we can email it to you.  We felt the club finances were private to the club and its members, so we didn’t want to publish it on the web.

I’ve gotten quotes for our weeklong trip for 2013.  The prices for Snowmass and Banff/Lake Louise were above what we normally price our trips.  So, it looks like Steamboat Springs for 2013.  I will send out an electronic survey in a few weeks to see which airports people want to fly out of.  This will help me price and plan the trip.

You should have received an electronic ballot and survey for the NSC 2012-2013 Election.  We will announce the new board in the June newsletter.

Thanks for your patience this year and I hope next year’s snow will be better.