Belleayre, Sunapee, Ragged, Loon, McCauley Pow – Early-Season Skiing with Slopes
'The Storm's' ski season is back - with Slopes
The Storm is once again partnering with the Slopes ski tracker app to document my 2025-26 ski season. This year, you can find me on the hill using Slopes’ “Find Nearby Friends” feature (you should be able to find me here). I have trips planned all over the country between now and May - follow me on Instagram to track where I’m skiing that day. If you find me, I’ll hook you up with some Slopes and (if I don’t forget them) Storm stickers, and a premium day pass from Slopes.
Ski season starts rusty. The routine of it. Bin-stowed gear retrieved from top shelves. Locating various devices and harnesses and cords. And batteries and backup batteries. And hand and foot warmers, charged and disposable. Base and mid and top layers, ordered and donned so rotely in spring, now overwhelm in their sequence and number. Does it really take all this stuff to go skiing?
Ski season starts cold and dark. Brittle brutal November. A two-and-a-half-hour drive to lap two-and-a-half runs. Breakfast en route. Rice cakes and berries and C4 cans from a soft-sided cooler occupying the passenger seat. No stopping. It’s time to ski.
Ski season starts tepid. That first run almost always a green. Let them sail, bases flat to the snow, no turning, just the glide. Waiting for that sensation. Like that first beer at day’s end. Mouth-to-gut the liquid presses some button that makes your brain say wow. Fireworks rising through the sky then kaboom. You know it will happen but it’s never not surprising when it does.
DAY 1 – BELLEAYRE, NEW YORK
The Catskills’ new old-reliable
I’m not accustomed to expecting much out of first days in the East. Even if it’s snowed heavily, little opens out here until it’s been plastered by the snowmakers and groomed. But that’s OK because I don’t trust my body yet anyway. One lift and one run is fine and outside of the opening swell at Killington the White Ribbon of Death is not the feared monster that it is in the West. No one really skis before Christmas out here anyway, especially midweek.
But Belle was flexing on its November opening day. The morning snow report named four lifts spinning but Belle opened a fifth just because. The terrain amounted to a pair of top-to-bottom routes spiderwebbing off into various upper-mountain trail combinations.
This is what a ski area run with an unlimited budget looks like. Like a new ski area. Like a thing recently unboxed. Like we’d just thought of it and imported from some nation with great institutional know-how and industrial skill the machines to actualize this vision. I don’t know if New York State should own ski areas, or if they should subsidize and operate those ski areas, or what will happen should some crisis force a retrenching of the bureaucratic largess that has transformed Belleayre from a rusty backwater into the finest ski area in the state in under a decade. But I do know that no one can question whether that cash has created the best possible version of 2025 Belleayre, because it most certainly has.
I skied 14,000 vertical feet, which is a lot for a day one for me:
DAY 2 – MOUNT SUNAPEE & RAGGED, NEW HAMPSHIRE
The New England Alps
What I like best about skiing Sunapee are the views. From the parking lot you can’t see anything except chairlifts shooting straight up in all directions but up top wow.
The lakes are big and obvious and even when entirely expected still stun and awe. But the lesser view is west off the summit toward the ski areas stacked up and down Vermont. New England hides its smallness in gullied ever-curving roads slithering between the high-walled forests but up top the illusion disintegrates. And there they all are. Hermitage Club and Mount Snow and Stratton and Magic and Okemo and the abandoned Plymouth Notch and Killington humping like caricatures of themselves in a cartoon pamphlet, like a storybook, a place where it’s always winter and where everyone always skis.
The skiing at Sunapee that morning was just OK. And just OK is pretty much the standard for early December New England skiing. A couple of runs off the top, meandering and converging at the bottom, mostly skied off by the time I showed up around 10 a.m. But a surprise, too: spliced into the network like lengths of replacement pipe glimmering amid a rusty tangle of waterworks were two ungroomed stacks of bumps and natural snow, thin and ornery but pliable, an inviting surface after the blacktop harshness of beat-up groomers (all videos by GoProBro):
Sunapee runs a detach quad top to bottom on 1,400 vertical feet and I skied until my toes turned to ice cubes and then I warmed up indoors with my feet hoisted atop an upstairs lodge heater and then I skied some more. And then I drove to Ragged Mountain.
Just saying hi to the big red barn
The reason to go to Ragged is to ski glades and there were no glades yet but I went to Ragged anyway. And that’s because I had to be at McIntyre in a couple of hours and I hadn’t been to Ragged in a couple of years and sometimes it’s nice to just show up somewhere and stand there nodding and say “yup.”
And I looked at the big red barn-turned-lodge and I looked at the other lodge and I looked at the snowguns blitzing the still-hibernating beginner hill and I looked at Spear Mountain similarly dormant and I looked at the six-pack and I said “yup.” And it was all still there but just to be absolutely certain I rode a half dozen laps off the sixer and actually I did find some glades:
I said “some.” I didn’t say how many.
And then I drove to McIntyre. But not to ski. I went for a ski event, hosted as it is each year by Ski New Hampshire. Last time I’d been to McIntyre for this event, in 2022, bare grass climbed up the bump, but this December the whales marshaled hillside like armies in a Melville fever dream, stacked and menacing machine-blown monsters towering over the night.
DAY 3 – LOON
Boyne is winning the New England arms race
Snowguns hammered all night and through my Loon Club window whales humped in a mini-Alps bald and round and stark against a cold blue sky. It was zero degrees or close to it and check-out wasn’t until 11 and I had a story to finish so I moved through my morning like a carpenter, slow and deliberate, understanding that speed is not the essential element in building something functional.
After all I’d skied Loon before and I was familiar with the flow and sprawl of Boyne’s Ski-93 banger, towering over the town of Lincoln like a snowy amusement park calling to southbound travelers. But I’d come back to Loon because the mountain has quietly evolved into one of the most competent ski area operations in the country over the past half decade, and I wanted to understand what had made it better, and how.
Loon is strange. The mountain’s lift fleet includes the last four-passenger gondola in New England, the first eight-passenger chairlift built in the East, and a wood-fired steam engine that travels back and forth between the two, even though skiers can easily navigate between them on snow (the train is broken right now anyway). Loon is overwhelming: the ski area has nearly as many snowguns as sister resort Sunday River, even though it occupies one-third the footprint. Loon is beautiful: one of just a handful of eastern ski areas that sits on U.S. Forest Service land, its saw-toothed White Mountain viewshed is one of the greatest in New England skiing.
The snowmaking flexed like a power hitter at a homerun derby. I don’t know how many trails were open, but it seemed to be everything on North Peak and West Basin. The scale of it stupefied, especially after alternating a handful of trails at Sunapee the day before. Cold temps had helped, but only as a laboratory for Loon’s beefcake snowmaking system, an intricate and ever-evolving sprawl of pumps and pipework, with ever-more fixed guns, ever-more capacity, a wilderness proving ground for machine-forward snow philosophies that would trickle through Boyne’s 11-resort network.
It was cold, but, after a long lunch with Loon’s ace mountain ops leader, Al Wickstrom, I skied until last chair, until tilted barriers blocked the RFID entrance to the gondola. Guns had been hammering all day at unseen South Peak, connected via a not-yet-on-for-the-season upper-mountain chairlift. “My hope is to give the snowmakers Christmas off,” Wickstrom told me. That was the sign of a big winter.
One rad feature of Slopes is that it will combine trip stats across mountains (you can still access stats from each ski area visit):
DAY 4 – MCCAULEY
Is going back a bad idea?
I didn’t want to go back to McCauley. Because the last time I’d gone to McCauley I’d burned 40 blower laps skip-hopping the bump’s rock-pillowed faces in a stop-start lake-effect storm that had converted Lake Ontario vapor into two-foot-deep Narnian snowfields.
It was January 2020 and it’s like the world knew what was coming and said, “OK have this and hold onto it because everything’s about to go sideways for like, a really long time.”
I’d driven five hours that morning expecting nothing. I’d gotten top-five-days-of-my-ski-life memories. Just freefalling all day down the mountain. Like our own private mini-Alta. I’d never even stopped to use the bathroom.
But after three days of early-season scritch-scratch groomers I was ready for turns-sans-edges and I asked Harvey where to go because Harvey always seems to know where to go. Harvey runs New York Ski Blog and he doesn’t care about the West or the Ikon Pass or the Cottonwoods or Whistler or anything in the ski world except for New York skiing and occasionally Vermont. And after relocating permanently from New Jersey to the Adirondacks earlier this year he was on a quest to ski 100 days, and when I asked him where we should go on Thursday for the best turns he texted back “Mac.”
“I’ll get there an hour before first chair,” he wrote. Because Harvey experiences skiing in the way cigar-smoking and monocled aristocrats experience whisky, with relish, aged, iced, in moderation, sipping and sinking into the fullness of it. “I’ll get there an hour after first chair,” I wrote back. Because I experience skiing in the way that I experience whisky: cheap, straight from the bottle, all at once, chasing what it will give me with no breaks in between.
Our clashing styles perhaps explain why we hadn’t skied together in nearly six years, since a Plattekill stop a few days after that McCauley trip. Harvey is as baffled by my transactional and transcontinental four-ski-areas-in-a-day lightning trips as I am by his earnest repeats of Gore and Whiteface and Platty – all fine ski areas that I am content visiting once or twice every winter or two.
But shared pow days, though felt and filtered through different hearts, fuse skiers in the quiet ritualistic way of live sports or concerts or citywide blackouts. This wild thing, formative even among the fully grown. So it made sense that we’d reunite at Mac because it was impossible for me to think of the bump without thinking of Harv, snow-sprayed in his black ski kit, playing, joyous in the way that children are, happy just because they can run.
Still, I didn’t want to go back to Mac. Because Mac in my mind-soul had become like a videogame world – the same every time I turned it on. Snow-socked and unbound, riotous never-quit, trenching snow like a cartoon rabbit raising earth as he fast-digs away from Albuquerque. And You Can’t Go Home Again really means you can’t go anywhere again, because that thing is never the same thing twice.
And Mac was different this time. The 1973 Hall double had made way for a 15-year-old Partek triple chair that Gore had replaced with a high-speed quad:
The glades were all closed and when we poached them we were scolded and when we poached them again we were scolded again and so we stopped skiing glades.
And it was just groomers for a while, until around 12:30 when they dropped the rope on Skyride and we rolled first tracks through maybe six inches, bottoming out onto the hardened whales:
And this time I did stop for lunch. And I skied half as many runs as I had in 2020. And I did not have a top-five ski day of all time. But I can definitively say that it was a top-five ski day of this winter up to that point.