I’ve Visited Hundreds of Ski Areas - Here’s What I Care About Most
Three things I look for at a ski area that have nothing to do with the snow
Where’s the best skiing? Common question, easy answer: Alta. Snowbird. Five hundred annual inches and it’s always snowing. Or seems to be. But everything in Utah is good. Snow snow snow. The little places are empty – stop by. Eagle Point or Sundance or Nordic. When the pow’s not hitting there’s Deer Valley, there’s Park City, Groomtown USA, 10,000-plus acres and fast lifts. Really though all the big Westerns are good even if they’re Interstate Obvious for the Big Pass Millions. Keystone or Breck or Copper or Vail or Snowmass or Heavenly or Palisades or Northstar. Oh yeah Jackson. And Targhee. Utah snow and terrain without the interstate access. Want big but uncrowded? Taos, Sun Valley, Crested Butte. Beaver Creek, still empty 17 years post-Epic and no one knows why. The PNW lacks snowmaking but there’s snow in the mountains from November to July. Idaho, Montana, the Great Undisclosed, 2,000-acre ski areas with claptrap lifts reaching skyward and you can walk to them from your car. Northern Vermont, that strange sub-New England, a better and snowier one, some transplanted Nordic state lost in a geographic wormhole, double the snow of New England Minor. Sugarbush, Mad River Glen, Stowe, Smuggs, Jay. Line them up and thank me later. For the best littles, find a snowbelt. Tug Hill off Lake Ontario. Rugged McCauley rips like a 633-vertical-foot Cottonwoods. Snow Ridge, antique, empty, 230 inches this past winter. But the best of The Little Lost Out Theres is Michigan’s UP, Lake Superior snowbanks stacked roof-rack height over the approach roads, Boho and Powderhorn and Porcupine and Snowriver and Marquette and Whitecap.
But even with all that All That the best skiing hits with luck and timing. Weather is ephemeral. You can chase but I don’t much. I ski when I can ski. Sometimes the pow hits and usually it doesn’t. Sometimes it’s cold and sometimes it’s icy and sometimes it’s windy and sometimes it’s all three. I drove all the way to Jay Peak last week and the tram was wind-closed. Which oh well. The best ski areas thrive not because they deliver 18 inches of fresh from perfectly functioning modern chairlifts serving 100-percent-open-at-all-times trail networks, but because they create a framework that adapts to whatever crappy weather crosses their patch of the continent on any given day. Jay’s framework: interesting and expansive terrain, aggressively honest over-communication, and a welcoming posture that has established the super-north resort as an international crossroads.
Yes Jay’s 400 inches of snow helps too. But as I’ve crisscrossed North America and its hundreds of similar-but-different ski area parking lots and base lodges and ticket booths and bathrooms and lift systems and snowgun forests and spiderwebbing trail networks, I’ve seen a lot of what works, and a lot of what doesn’t (beyond building your ski area in an obvious and proven snow pocket). And I’ve come to value three things above any other ski area attributes: experience, order, and attitude.