How to Ski with Your Kids and Not Hate Life
Do these 10 things and thank me later
Presidents’ Weekend 2016, Gore Mountain, New York. Mountain is packed, parking lot is packed, lodge is packed. Twenty below. I drop my daughter, 7, at ski school. She has not skied in a year and does not want to be at ski school. I leave, ski. Or try. Manmade slate, scraped to the fossil layer. I find my wife at the bar. She has skied two runs and is finished skiing. An amazing investment in lift tickets. I check on my daughter. Her third year in ski school and she still can’t ski. She is miserable. I am miserable. My wife does not seem miserable, but it is 11:30 a.m. and she is on her second drink. I should join her.
But seriously why were we doing this?
If, like me, your introduction to skiing was exiting a school bus at age 14 onto Mott Mountain in Farwell, Michigan with a K-Mart coat and a hunter-orange stocking cap and a pair of so-called Thinsulate gloves that had the warming properties of a manila envelope, then you, too, probably did not grow up in a ski family. Meaning you have no idea how to construct a ski family. Perhaps you think this sounds easy: let’s craft a family lifestyle out of something that’s fun and cool. And so, when your kid is 3 or 4, you book a weekend at Mammoth or Killington.
This is when you discover that creating a ski family is hard. And that doing it wrong is the fastest way to make the best thing ever (skiing) into the worst thing ever. Because instead of being fun and cool, the activity becomes terrible and frustrating. And incredibly, incomprehensibly expensive.
On Sunday of that 2016 holiday weekend, my daughter linked her first turns. She was a skier! I rejoice.
To reinforce the achievement, we day-tripped a few weeks later to Mountain Creek, where she promptly crashed into a fence.
It took a couple more years for Waverly to “get” skiing, to not feel as though each outing was Day Zero. This slow roll was my fault. I’d done a bad job creating a ski family. No structure, no consistency. So I re-ordered our ski life. And then I applied that order when my son, who was born in 2016, started skiing, so that he wouldn’t have a chance to remember that learning to ski is hard and cold and terrible (he doesn’t).
Logan at Taos last week:
I have now assembled that knowledge here, in The Storm Skiing Guide to Creating a Ski Family Without Destroying Your Soul or Drop-Kicking Your Helmet Into the Hudson River. It’s actually quite easy. I promise. Just do these 10 things:
1) Get the kids seasonal rentals
If you would like to witness the real-time evacuation of the human soul, rent skis for your child on a Saturday morning at a ski area: lines, confusion, waivers, an hour and a half stapling together a ski kit that requires four minutes of actual sizing and fitting.
Don’t do this to yourself or to your kid. Instead, find a ski shop that offers seasonal rentals. Go in August or September. It’s not a ski day, so it doesn’t matter how long it takes, but it won’t take long, because no one else will be there, because no one else thinks about skiing until December. It should cost between $100 and $150 for the season – or about the equivalent of two to three days of window-rate rentals. You return the equipment when you are done skiing for the winter. I rent from Pedigree in White Plains – their return due date is the Fourth of July.
2) Buy passes
It only takes one $700 Saturday to decide that “ski family” is an oxymoron. Because who can afford this shit?
But skiing is not like Burger King, where you just order whatever you’re in the mood for. It’s more like Thanksgiving dinner. No one wakes up that Thursday morning and grabs their musket to go kill a turkey. You plan ahead.
For a ski family, planning ahead means buying a ski pass. Like, now (it’s April), for next winter. Because going skiing once is more expensive than going five times. That’s hyperbole, but the more you order your life around pre-purchased rentals and tickets that remove the day-of financial panic, the more you will feel at liberty to do this activity, and the more you will enjoy it, and the more you will drive down the per-use price of these products.
This does not mean that you have to buy an Epic or Ikon Pass, or any multi-mountain pass at all (though the low-cost Indy Pass is perfect, when you can buy it). Your local hill probably sells kids season passes for less than $300. Many sell nights-only, non-holiday, or midweek versions for even less. Some ski areas, like anything owned by Mountain Capital Partners; June Mountain, California; Antelope Butte, Wyoming; and Loup Loup, Washington give kids 12, 12, 18, and 15 and under (respectively), free season passes. The Epic Day Pass is also a great option, with ungodly cheap kids’ rates for most mountains in the Midwest and East. A kid’s Ikon Base Pass is just $199 with the purchase of an adult pass. If only someone was keeping track of all this.
3) Remember that your kids don’t know the difference between Beaver Creek and Mountain Creek
My daughter’s first ski school day was at Sugarbush. Her next was at Killington. We don’t live anywhere near either. So why those two? Because I wanted to ski Sugarbush and Killington. But to a 5-year-old, these places are big and busy and frantic and freezing and far. There are at least 50 ski areas closer to NYC, and it wasn’t until I took her to Maple Ski Ridge and Royal Mountain and Plattekill and Bousquet that she started to actually like skiing. No liftlines. No stress. A place to sit down at lunch. And you know what? I liked it better, too.
4) Accept that skiing with your kids is not a shred-fest
The thrill of skiing is jumping and glades and pow-town and spring bumps and fast corn. It is the whoo-hoo and fast laps on fast chairs. It is lunch beers and pocket snacks in place of a proper meal at a designated hour.
The first step to creating a ski family is acceptance that you will not be doing any of these things with your kids. At least not at first. Because your kids can’t do those things. For them, the glide is enough. And you have to make it enough for you too.
That means 36 laps on Windham’s 50-vertical-foot Willpower triple chair or hiking 50 feet back up Wanatuska to un-Humpty Dumpty a yardsale. This is where it helps to get a little stupid. On endless Upstate green-blue laps, my daughter and I invent a cast of characters. I complain about Javier, her boyfriend who I hate because he uses the price of things as an adjective. I mimic Shreddington, a Park Brah who thinks that speaking in full sentences is selling out. I become an alien robot, who skis arms upthrust in a V, never turns, and stops only by crashing into things.
This was not leaping through Blue Sky Basin trees or jumping off rocks in Canada or weaving through Steamboat glades. But these did end up being some of the best ski days of my life. I wrote about one – a day at Catamount – a while back:
Whatevs to Your Weather Report Man, Let's Shred
The east side of the mountain had been fine, vaguely icy but skiable and flat enough that falls were of little consequence. So when we bucked right off the west side summit quad and contemplated the blue-angled runway funneling toward a banked switchback, I saw no reason not to go.
5) Enroll the kids in a seasonal program
Of course my daughter faltered in that lesson at Gore. She hadn’t skied in a year. She wasn’t a skier. She was someone who was forced to ski once in a while. She had to relearn it every time. And that’s the opposite of cool and fun.
Fortunately, just about every ski area in America offers season-long ski programs. Kids ski with the same kids and instructor for an hour or several at the same time every week. They ski with friends, which is fun. They explore, which builds confidence. And, most important, they do it every week, mentally transforming skiing from a couple-times-a-year novelty into something that they just do. Which means by the time you take that spring break trip to Heavenly, you don’t have to spend $2,000 for a week of ski school and hustle them to Meeting Spot C every morning by 8:15. They can just ski with you.
These programs aren’t cheap by bread-aisle standards, but they’re in line with standard rates in the modern kids activity megaplex. For several years, my son has attended Mount Peter’s seven-week, Saturday-or-Sunday program. It’s around $600 for the season. It’s not exactly Burke Academy, but he’s been able to ride the chairlift without an adult since age 6. He can get his boots on and off. When we went to Taos last week, he skied with me every day.
6) Buy boot bags
You’ve seen this, or you’ve done this: Fresh Direct and Ikea bags, loaded with a miscellany of ski boots and helmets and gloves and treat-snacks. I understand the temptation, but don’t do this. Buy each person in your family a boot bag that is made specifically to hold ski boots. I like Transpacks. Buy everyone a different color. In each person’s bag, place their ski boots, ski gloves, helmet, goggles, balaclava, and a ridiculous number of disposable hand and foot warmers. These items are to forevermore live always and only in this bag, not to be removed for any purpose other than skiing. Treat it like an apocalypse bug-out bag*, always at the ready, always complete.
*I do not have one of these. Living in NYC, I assume that I’ll be the first to go in any sort of global catastrophe. But have fun fighting to the death over canned green beans.
7) Pack lunch
There is no part of eating at a ski area that is not terrible: the lines, the prices, the hunting for open tables like hapless sitcom characters. Oh, and the food is usually terrible, too.
Buy a cooler bag, fill water bottles, consider a Thermos to bring soups and such. It will take some experimenting to determine what travels well and what your family will actually eat. If you have a minivan (which you should), it doubles well as a ski cabana. Pack driving snacks too.
8) Use skier drop-off
You’ve probably ignored this for your entire ski life, but most ski areas reserve a lodge-side lane where you can stop, unload gear and people, then proceed to the parking lot. Even if you are the only adult and you can’t send the children indoors to start booting up, you can at least lean the skis and poles against the racks to simplify the slog from your parking space. This, more than anything, will change your day.
9) Arrive early
The difference between arriving at a ski area half an hour before it opens and half an hour after it opens is like the difference between marmalade teatime at Aunt June’s and New Year’s Eve on Miami Beach. Shake the kids awake, toss a box of donuts in the backseat, and get yourself on the lifts before Jersey John and his eight identical stepcousins have exited the turnpike.
10) Accept that no ski family is perfect
Resorts often supply me with stock photos of smiling families arcing synchronized turns down bowling lane-smooth groomers, mountain peaks etched in the distance. These families are not real (if you are this family, congratulations; also, I don’t believe you). In a real ski family, someone wants to lap the rails and someone else wants to ski groomers and someone else wants to sleep until 11:00 and someone else wants to be drunk by noon. This is your world and I won’t get involved, because just getting here means that you have organized your winters in a way that enables frequent skiing. You arrive at the mountain with passes, gear, and food, ordered into bags. You know what to do. You are a ski family.
This stuff is funny because it is true... One thing I'd add - when you take the weeklong trip to a destination resort, spend the extra money to be on mountain. It makes it easier for the diehards to get first chair and for the casual skiers to start late and/or finish early. It should feel like a vacation for everyone.
Come to think of it, there's probably a list of things to make that big family trip a success.
#9 is the truest of all (Arrive early). We call it the "first chair lifestyle" and the kids are on board. That doesn't mean we get the literal first chair (although we WERE on the 1st and 2nd public chair ever at Whitefish's Snow Ghost Express), it just means we beat most of the public to the lift line and from there, have a plan to get as far away from the base as possible. But ALSO, as part of the "first chair lifestyle" we go in for lunch right at 11am. That's just part of the deal. This allows us to also beat the lunch traffic and actually find a spot to sit without the "are you guys leaving" dance. Then, as everyone else is heading in for lunch, we're headed back on the slopes.
First Chair Lifestyle sets up the day perfectly for less stress and great skiing.