December in Skiing, With the Slopes App: Oregon, Catskills, Michigan
Documenting my ski season with the world's coolest tracker app
Throughout the winter, I document The Storm’s on-the-ground ski adventures in the newsletter. In the past, this section has been buried below a paywall. For this winter, as part of my partnership with the Slopes ski app, I’m splitting this section into its own issue, to show my readers how cool this little tracker is.
But you really need to try it for yourself. If you like what you see below, you can snag a FREE YEAR OF SLOPES PREMIUM – a $29.99 value – when you upgrade to The Storm’s annual paid tier through Jan. 22. To upgrade your Storm subscription from free to paid, just click through below:
Please allow up to 72 hours for Slopes to send your free-year redemption code.
If you just want to try Slopes first, you can snag a free day pass by clicking here from a mobile device (you can only claim one Premium Day Pass per Slopes account per year, so if you’ve already tagged one from elsewhere, this link won’t work).
OREGON
I meant to ski in November but I didn’t ski in November. For the first time in several years. The East was low and I was backed up on The Storm and I was bracing myself for the end of Michigan’s win streak over Ohio State the Wolverines’ fourth-straight win over the Buckeyes, this time as heavy underdogs in OSU’s stadium, which of course I had been predicting all along.
But when ski season started, it started big.
Monday, December 3 – Mt. Bachelor
In early December last year this whole region was a pasture, brown, the hills locked tight or barely open. There are like five snowguns north of Tahoe all the way to the Canadian border and they don’t do much aside from spray toothpaste-thin layers of snow across magic-carpet runs. But this season the snows piled in early and deep, and when I hooked around 372 westbound out of Bend, the Big Beefcake stood sphynxlike over the horizon:
The ski area wasn’t as open as it looked from a distance. Bachelor skis 360 degrees off the cone, but only the rambling slice of mostly blues from Sunrise to Red lifts stood open. Good for first turns of the season, the snow chalky and firm, flexing in new skis and new boots in careful top-to-bottom arcs.
Tuesday, December 4 – Willamette Pass
At 1,563 vertical feet and 555 skiable acres, Willamette Pass reads like a nothing-special PNW medium. But then you exit the summit six-pack and turn right and you’re just like “dang”:
Willamette is typical West Coast playpen: deep snow, hero-spaced trees, everything skiable. Some runs plunge like waterfalls. Cottonwoods steep. Complete freefalls. But those trails are not groomed, the off-piste was trashed from refreezes, and we spent the day mostly cruising. I love how you can adjust perspective on Slopes to see different angles as you review your day on the bump:
All together, 21,254 vertical feet. That’s a big day for day two of the ski season.
Wednesday, December 5 – Mt. Bachelor and Hoodoo
Hoodoo sits an hour west of Bend, an Indy Pass Original, a thousand-footer that feels far larger, drama thrusting skyward off the beat-up access road:
This is a locals’ bump, a rowdy, rough-hewn and low-key. The lifts are surprisingly modern. I expected centerpole Riblets with Frisbee-width seats but it was mostly modern quads with safety bars (the only lift without bars, strangely, is the Easy Rider beginner chair, which rises all of 66 vertical feet).
Hoodoo was a drive-by, the real-estate open house before the inspection, when you just sort of look around and say “yeah I can see it.” Four runs. Didn’t matter with the off-piste still set like porcelain. But it’s always helpful to go, because trailmaps, with their visual tricks deployed to make the complex coherent, often don’t really capture a mountain’s slide-and-slash experience:
Looks straightforward, but Hoodoo’s trails wriggle and wrangle over multiple faces, and Slopes’ video captures this really well:
Then back to Bachelor. Snow firm but more lifts open by then, from Cloudchaser to Outback, and we rode them all. And everybody kept saying I had to come back in the spring, when the whole thing is live, 4,323 acres, the sixth-largest ski area in America, corn and fast laps in the sun. And that had been my plan until other duties summoned me for early-season turns. But I’ll probably have to go back soon. Powdr’s selling the joint, as you may have heard.
December 6 – Mt. Hood Meadows
Bachelor is dramatic, but Hood is godly, roaring skyward, pinched toward the top, the menacing volcano of your cartoon youth, draped in snow, lifts everywhere, ski areas everywhere.
I skied with a lifelong Meadows skier and we zoomed. Every lift in under two hours. I had a plane to be on down in Portland. Luckily the snow was still mediocre, impossible off the trails. It was enough to see it. My fourth bluebird day out of four. “Man it’s never like this.” But things become whatever they are when you see them.
A cool Slopes thing: you can track your speed on every inch of trail (watch the bar at the bottom):
And pinpoint exactly where you hit top speed:
Reviewing the full day, you’re like damn that really is a baddass volcano (you can see Timberline’s lifts rising to the left):
Here’s how the whole trip added up - Slopes groups resorts so that you can view your stats by day, trip, season, or lifetime:
CATSKILLS, PART 1
December 15 – Belleayre
New York City’s not such a bad place to be a ski bum. More than 100 ski areas sit within easy driving distance. Of the close-ish ones, under the two-and-a-half-hour orbit, the four Catskills resorts are the best and biggest and snowiest. And my daughter’s favorite of these since she was little has been Belleayre.
Many skiers don’t like Belle because it’s steep as drywall for a few hundred vertical feet before gradually pealing out into ever-gentler grades. But it’s state-owned, and since the Olympic Regional Development Authority – which also manages Gore and Whiteface – took the keys about a decade ago, they have funneled tens of millions into the place. Two new chairlifts. A gondola that is the nicest lift in the state. Carpets all over, including, this year, at the summit (novices can download on the gondy at day’s end). Hundreds of new snowguns. Renovated lodges. You could bring someone here and tell them this is a brand-new ski area and they’d have a hard time not believing you.
Belle is also an oasis for beginners. The Lightning Quad – a 447-vertical-foot ride that runs at whatever the opposite speed of lightning is – serves a clutch of a half dozen gentle, meandering greens that sit isolated from the upper mountain and dive-bombers lapping the gondola. My daughter’s friend was a second- or third-time skier, and we lapped this lift all morning with him.
Belle is big, and a lot of dead space will sometimes overwhelm your map:
But I’m able to just zoom in on Lightning quad and its spiderweb of greens, for a more granular view of our day:
It was my son’s first day of the year. He skied great, but maybe the highlight for him was towing the gear wagon down from the parking lot:
MICHIGAN
December 23 – The Highlands, Nub’s Nob, Hanson Hills
Michigan is the first skiing I ever knew, and the skiing can be sneaky good. Small vert but lake-effect bands, no traffic, good road crews, and no pretense, no attitude from the skiers. In the morning I landed at The Highlands, formerly “Boyne Highlands” and which everyone still calls “Boyne Highlands,” and lapped their obscenely expensive, obscenely brilliant Camelot sixer, a spaceship with bubbles, heated seats, and automatically lowering safety bars that dislodged three Triassic Riblets:
Across the mountain, and perhaps to demonstrate that overkill is not their default gear, parent company Boyne also replaced their 1963 Interconnect Riblet triple – which I believe is the longest lift in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula – with a brand-new Doppelmayr triple this past summer. The lift is slick and modern, with the button-footrest safety bars that are so much better than the T-shaped monsters that drop like a guillotine when lowered:
Indie royal Nub’s Nob sits across the street. Each ski area is visible from the other. In the Michigan flats, so much heft and hardware triggers the dissociative wonderment of a VR-headset trip to an alien planet.
Nub’s is a nub. Four hundred twenty-seven vertical feet. Doesn’t sound like much. But the ski area sprawls, trails running in all directions, snowy rivers through trees, little hike-ups planted all around, glades, lifts everywhere, color-coded to instantly wire the hill’s foundation to your brain.
The place is vibrant, alive, electric, ecstatic. Everyone loves Nub’s. This was obvious to me when I first tomahawked down Chute 30 years ago this month, and it’s obvious today to anyone who rolls through there.
When you hit two nearby mountains in one day, Slopes will sometimes combine them in the playback (while still counting each ski area as separate in your tally), even if you pause the app to drive over (yes, accomplished in ski boots):
On the way back south, I hit Hanson Hills, a T-bar bump about an hour from where I grew up. The T-bar wasn’t open yet, and the only route to the top was a ropetow that moved at approximately the speed of sound. Three laps was enough. It was just the one run open. So in and out, Brah (there was, um, snow, I assure you):
December 24 – Treetops
Man this video just sums up the whole day:
“But we are skiing!” Hell yes we were. The last time I’d visited Treetops, it was 20 below and you couldn’t have cut the corduroy with a chainsaw. But this day was pleasant, mid-20s, uncrowded, great skiing weather. When we got on the chairlift my son was like “where’s the bar?” and I said “there are no bars here,” and he said “I’m horrified!” But by the time we left he was dropping a series of “I’m really gonna miss this place” bombs, and we’ll deal with the lifts again if we have to (though really it’s time to move past the bar-less chairlift).
But really, skiing with your kids is just the best.
CATSKILLS, PART 2
December 28 – Hunter, Windham
My friend was in town from Bozeman, and since they don’t have much good snosportskiing in that vicinity, I offered to take him on a Catskills lightning tour. Needless to say he was awed by the concrete-to-marshmallow evolution of the snowpack between first chair and last, by the deathmarch of fallen let’s-try-skiing-this-Christmas people scattered in pieces along West Side Glide at Hunter, by the deep-brown hills everywhere but on the ski trails.
Typical Catskills, typical East Coast. Kind of funny for a season passholder at Bridger Bowl. He seemed to appreciate these bumps for what they are: the order of Windham, the chaos of Hunter, the no-beacon-required freefall of thousands of people engaged in something they’d describe more as an activity than as a lifestyle.
We spent most of the day at Windham:
And finished up at Hunter, riding the pair of new lifts: a Broadway sixer that runs higher up the bump than the old quad, which moved to an all-new line on beginner-oriented Hunter East. I’d not skied that part of the mountain in years, and it was prettier than I’d remembered.
So eight days in December. Not a huge month but typical for me in recent years. I’ll ski more in January, which sounds weird to say because it’s the eighth and I haven’t been out yet. But big things planned.
The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 93/100 in 2024, and number 593 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. 2024 will continue until the 100-article threshold is achieved, regardless of what that pesky calendar says.