Kissing Bridge's Long Decline Reverses Under New Ownership
Buffalo, New York is one of America's snowiest regions, but its ski areas have long underwhelmed. That may be changing.
I travel often and I craft routines around this. Variety is only tolerable if it exists within a predictable framework. Fly Delta for seatback TVs and free status bags and general competence. Rent Avis Preferred to skip the rental counter and walk directly to your car (this is free but almost no one does it). Stay at Holiday Inn Express because they are clean and simple and inexpensive and serve hot cinnamon rolls for breakfast.
This is my current, um, travel quiver. But it changes sometimes. When my son was little we preferred Air B&Bs to hotels so we could put him to bed in his own room at 8:30. But the chore lists and cleaning fees and inconsistency eventually turned me against short-term rentals. Sorry Vickie S., but I’m not helping you maintain Super Host status with a five-star review after you directed me in passive-aggressive 84-point font on page two of your 125-page Quaking Acres Welcome Home Manual to take out the garbage even though I paid a $300 cleaning fee and presumably that cleaning person could simply deposit their trash on top of mine and dispose of everything at once.
Another thing I have turned against is deploying reward points from a third-party such as American Express or Chase to book airline tickets or hotels. Because if something goes wrong the frontline workers shrug and look at me like I just asked for a bite of their pudding and say, “you’ll have to talk to the site where you booked it.” And also because sometimes things like this happen: our return flight from Panorama connected from Calgary to New York via Toronto. Fine. But midair we realized that our “connection” required a transfer to a different airport.
This is the sort of thing that shatters my brain like a dinosaur cannonballing onto thin ice. Because our “free” plane tickets had been not on Delta but on some broke-ass budget airline of the Frontier or Spirit sort, we’d already carved off a couple hundred dollars in baggage fees at Calgary. Now we would need to retrieve our heap of boot bags and ski bags and suitcases and somehow cram them into a Toronto taxi and drive across town and probably pay another set of baggage fees. And instead of just shrugging like a normal person and being semi-annoyed that we didn’t better scrutinize the flight path at the point of sale I stewed and spiraled and gnawed my soul to rawbone until I’d concocted an alternate travel plan that would take 10 times longer and be probably just as expensive and would make no sense to a normal person but immediately drained my aquarium shark tank’s worth of anxiety. On the Avis app I booked a one-way rental to New York using points, drove my wife and son to the tiny airport that apparently does nothing but fly back and forth between Toronto and Newark all day long, and drove myself and our gigantic pile of luggage across Ontario, crossing into New York on the Peace Bridge into Buffalo.
New York: surface lift kingdom
We’ll get to Kissing Bridge in a bit. First, some New York Skiing 101. The combined 5,138 skiable acres of New York State’s 50 or 51 active ski areas could comfortably fit within the boundaries of 5,317-acre Vail Mountain. Only imagine Vail was strung with 244 ski lifts (it has 32). Madcap. And that’s New York skiing: 34 ski areas with chairlifts, one of which is private and three of which are open to the public only on weekdays; 17 with just surface lifts, four of them private, but one of these (Cazenovia), accessible with an Indy Pass. Nine of these surface-lift bumps spin just one lift. For six of them, this is a ropetow (Val Bialis also has a non-operational chairlift that owner City of Utica intends to reactivate). For two others, the sole lift is a T-bar. And the last surface lift-only ski area is Emery Park, and Emery Park is the only ski area in New York – and one of just seven in the United States – that runs one carpet lift and nothing else.
It’s some magic carpet, stretching 920 feet through the forest. Installed in 2019 to replace a circa 1969 T-bar, Emery Park’s conveyor is either the longest or one of the longest ski-specific carpets in North America. It measures just 100 feet less than America’s shortest detachable quad, Deer Valley’s Burns Express.
It’s an incredible investment for a small publicly owned ski area. Emery is one of two surface-lift bumps run by Erie County Parks (yes, I’ve so far neglected to add them to my multimountain operator graphics and charts; I will do so presently). The project “cost the county around $850,000,” according to WIBX. Skiing is free, always, for everyone.
Well, anyone who can find the place. Aside from a sub-page buried on Erie County Parks’ website, Emery lacks even the janky muni-typical Facebook page managed by an overworked county employee who accidentally cross-posts updates about modified garbage truck schedules to the ski feed. Most online ski lists overlook the park. Even treasure hunters like skibum.net – a fantastic Ski Areas 101 resource – miss Emery Park.
Well I found it, two hours west of Toronto Pearson International Airport and 20-ish miles south of Buffalo. I pulled in at five that Sunday evening. Emery runs generous hours for a freebie: 3:00 to 7:00 Wednesday through Friday; 10:00 to 7:00 weekends and holidays. There are lights for night-skiing, but no snowmaking – an odd disconnect for a facility that dropped nearly $1 million on a new ski lift.
But 2024-25 had been a strong winter for Western New York. The fickle but powerful Lake Erie snowbelt had teamed up with several weeks of below-freezing temps to frost the region nicely.
Usually I am very particular with my ski kit, but given the low consequences of the terrain and ramshackle arc of a day that had started at an airport hotel in another country, I just went snowpants-and-ski-coat-over-driving-sweats. I still looked out of place clomping into the baselodge in Helly Hansen gear and GoPro Bro helmet, Hestras dangling from my wrists. I stood looking around. There was no obvious ticket window or check-in. I asked a woman seated before a pile of papers at a cafeteria table where I could get a lift ticket. She said it was free. I said yeah but don’t I need to sign a waiver or something? She looked at me as though this were a very dumb question and said “no you can just go ski.” And even though this seems like the setup for a gigantic lawsuit that could bankrupt the county I concluded it wasn’t my problem and just went outside and clicked in and loaded onto the conveyor.
The extra-long carpet is an incredible machine, sidewalled and still glimmering, dipsy-do rambling up the incline. It felt like a Disney World ride called Snowy Kingdom that stowed fat tourists on a five-minute ride through a homespun pastoral wintertime America.
A lot of these surface lift bumps are dead-boring, one lift running up the side of one extra-wide clearcut slope. Wow that gets old fast. But someone with an imagination – or perhaps just a tighter tree-removal budget - designed Emery’s 122-vertical-foot forest ramblers. They are not steep, which given the lack of legal protections for the ski area is a good thing, but they are at least interesting.
The place was busy with families. Emery has no rental gear so everyone brings their own, making the place resemble an actual ski area. Which I guess it is.
A chestnut seed buried somewhere maybe
Ten miles and 18 minutes east of Emery is Erie County’s second ski area, Chestnut Ridge. Emery may be obscure, but it’s Whistler compared to Chestnut Ridge. There’s more convincing online evidence that Abraham Lincoln is still alive and posting to YouTube as Mr. Beast than that Chestnut Ridge is a functioning ski area. The county’s website acknowledges the place like the Basketball Hall of Fame recognizes Michael Jordan’s two seasons playing for the Wizards. Yeah sure that exists but we’re going to pretend like actually it doesn’t. But I’d called the Erie County Parks Department some months before to confirm that the ropetow remained operational.
They’d said yes. But even after visiting, I’m not really convinced. The onsite road signage, stamped in one-point font itemizing the park’s three dozen points of interest, neglects to mention the ski hill. I circled the park three times before I found a 51-vertical-foot ropetow tucked along a ridge parallel to a busy sled hill. This facility’s hours supposedly mirrored Emery’s, but the tow was stilled, the lights were off, and no one was skiing. I stood there like an idiot with my skis slung over my shoulder taking pictures. The tow was one of the nicer ones I’ve seen, a late-model Sunkid:
I don’t know why the tow wasn’t spinning. There was no evidence of a parks official to ask. My guess is most skiers prefer the nicer lift and taller vert at Emery, and Erie Parks had de-emphasized the smaller operation. But here I was. The parking lot is the summit, so I skied down. Then I clicked out and hiked back up and threw my skis in the back of the rental car with Florida plates that I’d picked up at an airport in Canada and found a liquor store because damn that was a lot of travel and timezone hopping for five shitty runs. Then I drove to my hotel and drank wine and went to bed.
Revival on the western front
Buffalo should be one of America’s great ski cities. It snows nearly 100 inches per year. Feet all at once, sometimes, in Lake Erie blowdowns. The metro population of 1.1 million is famously hardy, bringing a Fortress Antarctica feeling to Bills snowgames. They are accustomed to snow, to cold, to wind, to being outside. Everyone may not have skis, but everyone has coats and hats and gloves and long underwear and more coats and additional coats as well. No one in Buffalo is standing around saying, “Yeah I’d love to go play in the snow but I just don’t have the proper equipment.”
But Buffalo is not one of America’s great ski regions, because Buffalo lacks the central feature of a great ski region: great ski areas. There are the two microscopic, government-subsidized, natural-snow-only, no-rental-gear-sorry-Brah operations that I mention above. Between them sits the far larger Buffalo Ski Center, a mash-up of three former side-by-side mountains, which resembles an actual ski area but is slow to open, closes to the public on weekends, and often offers just a handful of weekday trails. A bunch more local ski areas – I don’t know how many – have failed over the decades.
The only fully public, chairlift-served ski areas in Buffalo’s easy day-trip orbit are Kissing Bridge and Holiday Valley. Holiday Valley of course is immaculate, sprawling, brilliant. One of the best-run ski areas in America. Beyond every chairlift, it seems, is another chairlift, 11 in all, seven of them built since 2003, four of those detachables. Marked glades all over, but the trees between nearly every trail are skiable. Glimmering baselodges, so many it’s hard to keep track of what they could all be for. Because of all this, Holiday Valley has for decades been the busiest ski area in New York. Holimont, right next door, is nearly as large but, like Buffalo Ski Center, is closed to the public on weekends.
Kissing Bridge could have been a contender. It’s 20 minutes closer to the city, east-facing on a mile-and-a-quarter-wide ridge lined with six chairlifts. But KB took its lake-effect perch for granted. Snowmaking upgrades lagged, and the system covered just half a dozen runs. Whole trailpods would sit dormant for entire winters. Midseason closures became common. The mountain’s snow reports were too often an excuse factory for why Kissing Bridge would again fail to meet customer expectations for a fully open ski area in the middle of winter in one of America’s snowiest regions. The ski area’s claim of 700 skiable acres was one of the most suspect in skiing, especially with signs everywhere forbidding tree skiing. The season pass was expensive, seasons were short. The ski area with one of the industry’s most playful names was, frankly, kind of a curmudgeon. Kissing Bridge? More like Celibate Sewer Grate.
Then Rhett McNulty showed up. Unlike New York ski area saviors at Titus and West and Holiday Mountain (a distinctly different outfit from Holiday Valley), McNulty was not local. A California dude in a baseball cap with a puppy dog mascot named Maple. A Tech Bro and I don’t mean that as a bad thing. He founded or co-founded: shopping.com (1996), sold to Compaq for $220 million; shopit.com (2006), which rapidly became the largest e-commerce app on Facebook; and several other e-commerce, fintech, cloud storage, insurance, wireless, consulting, and recreation companies. Apparently he also knows how to negotiate: KB’s reported purchase price was $1,060,000.
This SoCal Santa Claus showed up with bags of tech money slung over his shoulder and started dumping it all over the hill. Four new fan guns and 25 stick guns blew the snowmaking footprint from six trails out to 22 ahead of the 2024-25 ski season, covering most of the ski area’s Central zone, from Hemlock to World of Your Own:
Then he turned them on. So, it happened, did Mother Nature. When I showed up on Feb. 24, the joint was 100 percent open. No bare spots. It was a Monday, empty, in the midst of a transition from fast morning groomers to Elmer’s base-grabbers, but KB spun four chairlifts, with only the redundant Holly Triple and Tanglewood Double idle. The trail network – parallel slashmarks down a long ridge – is more interesting than it looks on the trailmap. Standard-issue fall-line screamers the width of aircraft carriers predominate, but narrow cuts and canyons blaze an unpredictable spiderwebbing path through the broad forested sections. There are no marked glades (the run called “Glade” is in fact an open trail), but the trees, outside of the severe inter-peak ravines that define New York ridge skiing, are widely spaced and skiable.
From the lift I texted KB marketing director Pat Morgan to ask him about the stay-off-my-lawn no-tree-skiing-signs still hammered to the summit trailmaps:
In the afternoon, I sat with Morgan, McNulty, and longtime KB President and GM Rich Fanelli in the conference room/gear locker/office space upstairs from the indoor ticket windows. This room, Fanelli said, had at one time been a retail and rental store. But skier volume had drooped, and KB was no longer luring the busloads of Buffalo youth that justified such a space. Past owners repurposed the room for staff, but Fanelli, who had grown up on the mountain himself, would rather see the skiers return.
McNulty plans to make that happen. To complement the ongoing infrastructure upgrades and lure disillusioned Buffa-locals – as Buffalo natives universally call themselves* – back, McNulty set KB’s initial 2025-26 season pass price at $349, one of the lowest in the state and $126 less than the $475 early-bird price for 2023 and 2024.
I skied until nearly 5:00. Kissing Bridge to NYC is a six- to seven-hour drive – farther than Jay Peak or Stowe or Sugarbush and roughly the same distance as Sunday River. I’d skied nine of the previous 10 days and was physically and mentally beat to hell. But the drive was mostly expressway and rural New York interstates are deserted on weekday evenings and I sailed home and dropped our neatly bundled gear in Brooklyn and returned the car to LaGuardia and rode the bus and train (this is what we call the subway) home. Avis said the rental was overdue and not only charged a late fee but a daily rental on top of it, and it was all in Canadian dollars and very confusing and I’m still trying to sort it out with them. So my free-points rental hack to avoid baggage fees and an hour of stress somehow ended up costing more than we’d spent to get the three of us from New York to Calgary and home. Eventually routines break down if you never stop moving.
*This is probably not true, but it should be.
The Storm teamed up with Slopes to document my 2024-25 ski season. Check out previous trip reports:
Panorama Is Skiing’s #LifeHack
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Did you suggest to KB leadership they should partner with Indy Pass? 🤞
Great writing Stuart!