My game hung in Chrome at one point. Quitting and relaunching gave me the thermometer loading screen, which stopped at roughly the base of the mountain.
Launching the game in Firefox, it worked right away.
I had some Chrome issues last night also. At least 3 times, pressing the up-arrow by mistake somewhere where it didn't do anything tossed me out of the game, but the reload was fast. Actually, the reload was spotty: several times it was very fast, but at least twice I had the same thermometer loading pauses that Jon reported.