Mt. Peter, Up-Upstate, Mt. Peter Again
A midwinter week in skiing, with Slopes
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Sunday, Jan. 26 – Mt. Peter, New York
For the past several years, I have skied more days at Mt. Peter than I have anywhere else. The question is “why” and the answer is this:
And this:
This is my 8-year-old’s (the kid in the Spyder jacket’s) fourth season in Mt. Peter’s seasonal program, and because it’s basically an instructor-supervised free-ski exercise of chipmunks pack-flying down the hill, he’s been able to ride a chairlift without an adult since age 6.
There are lots of lodge parents at Mt. Peter, and plenty of bar parents, and a few I’d-rather-sit-in-my-car-on-my-Pet-Rectangle parents. But I of course am a ski parent. A ski parent that skis this 60-acre trail footprint enough to appreciate that entire faces that had been mothballed for years were at last un-gated. These runs looker’s left beneath the lift hadn’t been live - to my knowledge - in at least five years:
Open at last, thanks to cold temps, good snowmaking, even real snow falling from the sky. Everything open. The way ski areas unroll in your summertime imagination. I skied alone and then we skied another hour together after class ended. The snow marvelous. The crowds, mostly kids, joyous.
Friday, Jan. 31 – Up-Upstate
Dry Hill, New York
There’s Upstate New York and then there’s Up-Upstate New York. “Upstate,” for me, is anything north of Westchester County. Up-Upstate is the Region Of Things That People Who Did Not Grow Up In New York Did Not Learn About In School. So basically past Albany. But this also happens to be where the skiing gets really interesting, and really good. Gore, the largest ski area in the state; Whiteface, the tallest in the East; Titus, a gentle sprawl teetering on the edge of Canada. There’s West and Royal and Oak and Willard and Maple Ski Ridge, and up beyond these in the snowbelt is Woods Valley and McCauley and Snow Ridge, which can scoop 200-plus in a good winter (this is a good winter - Snow Ridge has recorded 228 inches). And up beyond all of those, so far that it makes Killington feel like it’s in my backyard, is Dry Hill.
Dry Hill is not just far. It’s far and small: 300 vertical feet, 42 acres. An archetypal rural bump, simple and necessary, serving 24,000 civilians in Watertown and 13,000 G.I. Joes 20 minutes down the road at Fort Drum. It was one of the last chairlift-served public ski areas I’d yet to visit in New York State.
It had snowed daily for weeks and weeks and the moment I showed up the snow stopped. From the parking lot you can see the whole hill, framed by a Hall double on the left and a Hall T-bar on the right. Watertown, New York is the onetime home of the now-defunct-but-still-ubiquitous Hall lift manufacturer and Dry Hill was their lab. Exhibit A: the various Seussian double chair towers that made the machine a test-case and a showpiece. I couldn’t wait to ride it.
I’d have to wait to ride it. Some kind of sensor issue had stilled the lift, which has no name. It is just “the chairlift.” I lapped the T-bar instead, rowdy snow skier’s far left, narrow routes through the woods, threatened by refreeze but still penetrable. Glades skier’s right, short but recently cleared, nice pitch. Fast laps over 250 vertical feet.
My plan had been to ski an hour and bounce. Boo Wells-Jareo, owner and operator since 2022, altered that plan when she spotted me picking up my lift ticket. “I listen to your podcast,” she said. “I’ve been looking for you,” I said back. And so we skied together and I skied with her son Tucker, and after that she made us grilled cheeses and soup. Sometime in there the lake-effect kicked up off of Ontario and it dumped for the rest of the day (Tucker skiing ahead, Stuart Winchester on GoPro):
And that double chair finally opened:
Dry Hill’s trailmap is terrible, a relic from a more function-over-form ownership era. The map looks like something that happened when whoever owned the mountain 35 years ago asked his friend Randy to point his Kodak out the window the next time he flew his cropduster over Old Man Mackenzie’s neighboring apple orchard:
My point is that this place, like so many small ski areas, is more fun than its trailmap would have you believe. What looks like a clear-cut fun-sapper is a many-folded ski park filled with little tucks and angles – especially since Wells-Jareo’s family has been thinning the glades and building out terrain parks (Tucker skiing; SW filming):
Fortunately, the owners agree with me about the trailmap. I’m hoping to get Boo on the pod later this year to break down the family’s rebuilding of this remote but nifty little mountain, which I shredded as thoroughly as I could:
Brantling, New York
Have you ever seen a T-bar that moves slower than plate tectonics? I hadn’t either:
Brantling is an extreme version of a community ski area. There is no one skiing here over the age of 12. Like I missed a sign on the way in: “Out of here, Old Man.” Maybe that youth-skew is because of the 176 feet of vert and maybe it’s just all the surface lifts, which stack densely across the face amid the sometimes-zigzag-sometimes-straightline trail network that’s more complex and creative than it appears:
It helped that it was just nuking:
After a half-dozen winding T-bar laps, I moved to the handletows. A ski-school trio arrived to load the longest one just as I did, and I paused to let them proceed. At that moment, a dozen-kid phalanx descended. I let a few pass and then stepped back into line. This inspired some knucklehead to remark, “Oh so now people are just cutting the line up in here.” And I turned around and said “Kid, I’ve been waiting in this liftline since before you were born.” Then I stepped up to load. And then I got absolutely dominated by this handletow, managing the improbable trick of being towed horizontal and, when I held fast to the line, spinning longwise over the rope like a product in an industrial assembly line. It was without question my worst lift-load fail in at least 30 years, and would have landed me in Ski Jail had it been witnessed by anyone who had graduated fifth grade. Fortunately the GoPro was by then out of battery.
This day was also supposed to include stops at Northampton and Powder Mills Park, two ropetows that – little-known fact – are operated by Swain Mountain. But I’d enjoyed a glorious overstay at Dry Hill, and when I plugged “home” into the GPS from the Brantling parking lot, my ETA was somewhere around 2 a.m. High five, Stu, for six-hour drives through a blizzard.
Sunday, Feb. 2 – Mt. Peter again
Conditions have to be pretty dicey for me to spend more time sitting in my van eating lunch than I do SnoSportSkiing, and I spent more time in my van eating lunch that day than I did on the bump. It was the kind of icy that people who have never skied the East think is the kind of icy we perpetually ski. But I had a big trip the next day and I didn’t want to get hurt, so eight laps and I called it.
Hey, you toured my old neck of the woods! In my active trailrunning days, we'd race the #TrailsROC Winter Trail Festival (WTF: get it? haha), and run by the base of the Powder Mills slope. There's also an retired slope there, complete with truck wheels on telephone poles, that was a rope tow in the past. It's got a nice little trail pod that we'd use for hill training.
Still haven't made it to Dry Hill or Snow Ridge yet. Glad you made it home okay. Brantling to NYC is a haul, and right through lake effect country.
I grew up skiiing Brantling in the 1950s and early Sixties, mostly at night, tons of snow and mostly freezing my ass off. No handle tows then, just plain old rip-your-gloves-off rope tows. Perfect back in those days.