#SkiNewYork – Mt. Peter, Greek Peak, Catamount, Hunter, Holimont, Buffalo Ski Center Resort Ski Area Club
Empire State Skiing, with Slopes
DAY 9 – MT. PETER, NEW YORK
This was year five for my son Logan at Mt. Peter’s low-key, low-commitment seasonal program, a once-per-week-for-seven-weeks group skiaround that has the twin benefits of being an hour and 15 minutes from Brooklyn and including one of his good schoolfriends. It also has the benefit of being at Mt. Peter, which with the exception of one extremely steep race trail is one of the more approachable bumps anywhere.
During Logan’s three-hour class, I ski. A lot of the parents don’t, but Bryan does. Bryan is Logan’s friend’s dad. He grew up in Kansas, where there is no skiing, and lives in New York City, where there is also no skiing. He visited Snow Creek, Missouri a time or two as a teenager, and later tagged along with his wife to a work seminar at Jackson Hole, where he took a lesson because he didn’t realize that the instructor would interpret his Brooklyn address as cover to host a one-on-one MAGA rally, and also because he didn’t realize that it was Jackson Hole. In spite of all this, Bryan became a skier when the family purchased a cabin nearby and decided their daughters needed a wintertime activity.
So while the lifelong-skier ski parents who ski five days per year on their trip Out West fiddle with their Pet Rectangles amongst piled bags in the baselodge, Bryan and I ski. He’s bashful about calling himself a skier, but on this January Sunday, he’d skied more days that winter than I had. At one point later in the season, he held up the torn glove he’d purchased a decade ago at a Jackson Hole church sale and said “I need to fix these,” and I said, “you can fix them into that garbage can over there,” and he said, “no way, I paid $5 for these.” And is anything more Skier than that?
On the Ole’ Pete lift we talk about Middle-Aged Bro Stuff like mortgages and medical appointments and snowstorm contingency plans. Then we ski whatever we want and meet back at the lift because every trail ends at the same place at Mt. Peter.
DAYS 10-12 – GREEK PEAK, NEW YORK
Because it’s not that expensive and because there’s a full-service hotel-with-restaurant-and-water-park across the street and because this mountain has the best top-to-bottom green-trails-that-are-actually-trails-and-not-catwalks in New York State, Greek Peak turned out to be a perfect family-from-NYC-with-widely-varying-ski-abilities-and-enthusiasms MLK weekend destination last year:
So this year we visited Greek Peak again for the MLK long weekend. And all the same things that were great about it last year were great this year, except it didn’t snow as much.
Rather than re-itemize all of those mountain attributes here, I’m going to challenge my own generation’s unearned sense of superiority around our collective latchkey upbringing. Self-congratulatory Gen-X analysis has proliferated in recent years, which usually goes something like this: This sandwich generation, born between the early 1960s and 1980 or so, landed in a historic sweet spot, dodging both the extractive generational smugness of the Baby Boomers and the earnest feelings-ball of the Millennials. We grew up without the internet, without a supercomputer in our pockets, without parental supervision, without real concerns of a military draft, and without fealty to pre-1968 social constructs that had sanctioned smoking-and-yelling as an acceptable parenting, teaching, and management style. But also without affordable starter homes, a proliferation of factory union jobs, post World War II invincible-America optimism, a car-optional lifestyle, affordable healthcare, or social gathering spaces that did not involve commerce. This unique combination of social and cultural pressures – lots of free time with fewer distractions than current youth and a harder path to self-supporting adulthood than our parents – yielded a generation that is supremely creative, beholden more to bettering the future than honoring the past, and less entitled and self-congratulatory than the generations before and after it.
Which, OK, some of this is true: I didn’t use the internet until I was 19, and my childhood was essentially an epic of unstructured and unsupervised free time that neither of my children can quite believe in. As I wrote the other day, when my daughter was 8, she asked me how old I was when I was allowed to go outside by myself, and I couldn’t answer the question because I couldn’t remember ever not being allowed to go out alone. That freedom and flexibility from a young age, anchored in an analogue world, probably helps explain my imagination and independence.
But this is where Gen X self-satisfaction needs to take a smoke break. Because you know who let us be outside unsupervised all the time? The fucking Baby Boomers. And you know who stopped letting their kids have mud fights and dam the local creek without a permit? Gen X. We are the ones who ended thousands of years of free childhood play by reclassifying children from small-but-incrementally-capable humans to endangered and possibly suicidal animals in need of constant supervision, and shamed and threatened anyone who didn’t do the same to the point that 21 is no longer considered the legal drinking age, but a milestone at which Billy can (possibly) run down the driveway to fetch the mail all by himself.
And Dear God has it been annoying to raise kids like this even though I don’t want to. Because I remember being 5 and 6 and 7 and 8 very vividly and wandering alone through forest and field and local stores and never dying while doing so. But I go along with our U.S. American Way because I’ve been culturally compelled to and because I don’t have the means or the will to fight back and because part of participating in society is taking the path of least resistance on most issues. But I’ve been pushing this particular nitpick as far as I can, and when Logan (9), and his friend (11), and his dad Dave and I ended up in Greek Peak’s Trax Pub around 4:00 on Saturday, and I got acquainted with a few Miller Lite tallboys and a “single” of Jameson that probably would have filled a half-pint, and I was cold and sort of over skiing for the day and the boys were clearly bored after massacring a basket of fries, I said, “Kids why don’t you go ski?” And the part I didn’t say was “this thousand-vertical-foot mountain filled with strangers, and without a cellphone or tracking device of any kind*, and down icy runs in the bitter cold.” And I looked at Dave (the other dad), who’s a Scottish fellow and therefore immune to the dumber habits of Americans, and he was like, “see you boys later,” and off they went.
*Edit: my wife informed me, upon reading this article, that both kids were in fact wearing GPS-enabled smartwatches.
And we said “go ski three runs and come back,” and they skied four because they “lost track” and told us that they’d had a conversation with a “nice man” on the lift and the reason none of this worries me is that these kids are as smart as we were at this age, and they can comprehend the workings of even a slightly complex ski area like Greek Peak, and neither of them is going to be carted off by a menacing stranger without some amount of noise that would surely be noticed by the hundreds of other skiers milling about, most of whom, I’m assuming, are wired to not abet the doings of criminals.
If we’re ever, as a society, going to wrench back the childhood that we already irretrievably stole from an American generation-and-a-half-or-more, ski areas – busy, slightly intimidating, challenging, massively fun and rewarding of creativity and navigational competence – are among the best places to start.
DAY 13 – CATAMOUNT, NEW YORK
At a certain point, you lose control of your kids’ schedule. At 11 you can drop them in the backseat of a Ford Escape and take subzero Friday night laps at Mohawk Mountain en route to Sunday River and not bring them home until near midnight on Monday after a Loon Mountain pitstop. By the time they hit 16 you can entice them with a week of slopeside Panorama laps at the top of B.C. and they’ll say, “have fun I can’t miss my friend’s birthday party.” Which is both liberating and disheartening, but natural and normal enough that I never forced more ski participation as my daughter’s annual ski days slipped from around 15 to five or fewer over the past couple of winters.
But then the Magic Thing happened, which is that Waverly’s friend decided he wanted to ski and so suddenly she was interested in skiing again. They had a short mid-week school break and I offered to tour them around a couple nearby mountains. Jake had skied only two days before, so I set the first stop at Catamount, a thousand-footer straddling the New York-Massachusetts state line where long green runs flow beneath a mess of five triple and quad chairs. And I said “Jake take a lesson” and he did:
By the end of the day, the kid was skiing off Ridge Run, a gorgeous top-to-bottom green-circle trail weaving through the forest. He even handled the short blue Mountain View trail, a moderately pitched run that terminates in a spiderweb of greens.
Catamount is one of several New York ski areas – along with West Mountain, Holiday Mountain, Titus, and now Kissing Bridge – that has remade itself under new ownership in the past decade. When Wave and I visited in 2018, Cat’s groomers were solid concrete and a pair of SLI doubles dating to 1967 and ’71 teetered up the ridgeline. The parking lot was empty, the lifts were empty, the hill was empty. It made for a terrible but also hilarious ski day:
That spring, the Schaefer family, longtime owners of Berkshire East, bought the joint, and over the next several years knocked down those SLIs, installed three new-used chairlifts, modernized the snowmaking, cut new trails, and generally nudged the bump into the 2020s. And yeah I guess it worked: the parking lot was two double-parked rows deep when we arrived 15 minutes before first chair, the lodge was full, and Ridge quad had a small wait all day. There’s still more lurking boilerplate than I’d like, and I miss the tree islands that once crowded the frontside, but Jon Schaefer told me on the pod in 2019 that he wanted to make Catamount one of the best small ski areas in the country. I’m not sure if they’re quite there yet, but no one who shows up expecting a competent ski operation is going to leave disappointed.
DAY 14 – HUNTER MOUNTAIN, NEW YORK
Less dramatic but arguably as impactful as the evolution of Catamount has been the transformation of Hunter Mountain since 2018. With 1,600 vertical feet and a blow-the-doors-off snowmaking system just over two hours from New York City, Hunter, historically, has been crowded, chaotic, rowdy, and filled with assholes. But a sequence of investments from Peak Resorts and then Vail Resorts have somewhat tamed all but the last one (an unsolveable problem, I’m afraid, as I was reminded on a very long ride up the Kaatskill Flyer with a moron who couldn’t contemplate how we could possibly re-order our chairlift seating arrangement after he cut between our party).
Anyway: Peak’s 2018 Hunter North expansion and supplemental parking lot, Vail’s 2024 addition of a third six-pack, the removal of several older double chairs, and significant snowmaking upgrades – including on the notorious Annapurna trail – have nudged Hunter from Chaos Island to perhaps just Disorderly Island. Or at least a far more pleasant place to ski.
This was, frankly, perhaps my best day ever at Hunter Mountain, a ski area I have visited probably more than any in New York State other than Mt. Peter. The bump is always better on weekdays – and not better like eating warm pizza is better than eating cold pizza, but better like eating pizza is better than eating dirt. But 2026 weekday Hunter is also better than time-machine versions of weekday Hunter: the grooming held up most of the day, the terrain parks are finally in the right places, and the lift network no longer concentrates every skier on the mountain to the Hellgate-7th-Avenue-Gun-Hill-Road bullrun.
But I suspect there’s another reason I enjoyed Friday more than Hunter Mountain ski days past: I skied the stuff I’d always ignored. At some point, I assumed the kids would want to split off and ski without me, or hole up in the lodge for Serious Phone O’ Clock. But that never happened, and we skied all day, and so I skied mostly greens and blues, and found some terrific and terrifically pleasant runs, especially the winders at the top of Hunter East and the lower-level runs striping down from the top of the Broadway sixer.
By mid-day, Jake was able to ski Belt Parkway, the meandering, sometimes steep-ish, nearly-always-mobbed blue that circles Hunter Mountain from the top of the Kaatskill Flyer to the bottom.
This was the best ski day Wave and I have had together at least since we went Peak-to-Creek at Whistler two years ago, and perhaps of all time, and by the end of the day she was just gliding strong and confident down the mountain:
At day’s end, this happened, and damn it if it wasn’t just one of the best moments of my life:
In the end, she ended up committing to Brown, which was her first choice, and I’m so happy and proud. But the Michigan connection will always be there.
DAY 15 – HOLIMONT, NEW YORK
There is something unsettling about private ski areas. It’s a familiar thing that feels like a status trap. Like walking into a random backyard barbecue where everyone is named Steve or Ed or Carol and they all know one another from like some fucking sailing club or something. And eventually someone asks “so where do you summer?” and you’re like, “uh Doug invited me,” and they gasp “there is no Doug!” and it’s the biggest fuss since Cheryl found the Kensington’s schnauzer rooting through her marigolds.
Holimont is a private ski area of the sort that we have a lot of in New York. Which is to say that it’s only private sometimes. It’s open to the public only when no one wants to be there, like when it’s five degrees and cloudy on a Tuesday. But at least that’s when you can also park directly in front of the baselodge.
Which is directly in front of the high-speed quad. Holimont is one of just eight ski areas of the 50 in New York that spins a detachable lift. This machine, the Exhibition Express, is one of six chairlifts serving a weaving, wandering trail network on a 700-vertical-foot ridge.
After four runs, I did something I rarely do: switched out my dailies – Blizzard Whatevers – with my great-conditions go-tos: 102-centimeter underfoot Blizzard Rustler 10s. And I did this because I had to admit something I’d hoped would prove untrue: that Holimont is one of the best ski areas in New York State. Powder everywhere. Untracked trees. Creative lines beneath the lifts and powerlines. Narrow routes into bowls. Tricky little hills and unmarked side paths that send skiers inextricably to distinct zones of what looks deceptively like a long-ridge, every-run-the-same ski area.
And there were no sailing club vibes. No one asked me what I was doing there. No one asked me anything at all, other than the liftie who wanted to know about my collection of wicket tickets. I skied it was great. I don’t know what else to say.
DAY 16-17 – ADVENTURES IN OHIO (to come in a separate post)
Stand by to read about that one time I skied in Ohio. Well I guess I already wrote a preview:
DAY 18 – BUFFALO SKI CLUB CENTER
Buffalo Ski Center skis like three former ski areas mashed together. That’s because it’s three former ski areas mashed together. As Buffalo Ski Center – which sometimes refers to itself as “Buffalo Ski Club” – explains on its website:
Buffalo Ski Club brings together three ski areas — Sitzmarker Ski Club, Ski Tamarack and Buffalo Ski Club—and covers 300 acres with 43 trails ranging in terrain from expert to beginner.
… the Buffalo Ski Club continues traditions begun in 1931 when eight families from Bavaria , Germany , came together to share their passion for skiing. They purchased land and a farmhouse in Holland not long after and built the area’s first rope tow. They spent winter weekends skiing, then gathering for huge feasts and songfests. By the 1950’s they had moved to Colden, where the Buffalo Lodge still stands. In 1948 UB students and WWII vets, members of the Sitzmarker Ski Club, bought the adjacent property on Lower East Hill and began to clear the hill still called Old Sitz just below the Sitzmarker Lodge. In a building made of cleared timber they gathered as families for weekends of skiing and comraderie. In the 1960’s Dr. Lore established Ski Tamarack just south of Sitzmarker. Although it was a commercial venture, Tamarack was always a family ski area. In 1991 Buffalo Ski Club and Sitzmarker merged and in 2004 the Club acquired Ski Tamarack from the Lore family to make the entire Colden Ridge one private, family-oriented ski club.
I believe these mentions of “club” are dated, as the Buffalo Ski Center Club of Greater Buffalo appears to have quietly rebranded over the past few years from a public-private hybrid that only allowed non-members midweek to a public-private hybrid that allows non-members any day but only sells season passes to members.
Or something like that. The Buffalo Ski Club Center’s website appears to date to the what’s-your-@hotmail era, with just enough information to contradict itself while omitting clear guidance on things like “am I allowed to ski here?” or “is the ski hill open?”
But last year, Buffalo Ski Resort Center at Sitzmarker-Tamarack-Buffalo-Ski-Club joined Indy Pass with just one blackout date (Jan. 3, which I’m assuming is some sort of club-celebration date). Anyway, I interpreted this as permission to show up.
The first-to-open-on-a-weekday base area at Buffalo Mountain Ski Area is Tamarack. This sits down the sort of access road that makes you feel stupid for not better scrutinizing the GPS route before clicking “go”: a narrow, winding dirt road that crosses a one-way bridge before slogging uphill to the parking lot. It’s not a long road, but it’s long enough to give you time to consider alibis when Cousin Orville of the Buffalo Orvilles greets you at road’s end with an aimed double-barreled 12-gauge and demands to know what happened to his chickens. But at the end of the road a ski lift shot out of the flats up a long, steep hill, and other than the fact that there were only two other cars in the parking lot, I assumed I was at a ski area.
I was, uncharacteristically, onsite before the lifts opened, and figured I’d grab a snack at the cafeteria, but there was no cafeteria. Well, there was one, but it wasn’t open. In fact, there was no one in the baselodge at all. Maybe this was because it was Thursday. Maybe this was because it was five degrees outside. And maybe it’s because the rest of the world was as confused as I was as to whether we were allowed to ski at Buffalo Ski Park.
At 3:00, the Tamarack double opened. What a wonderful trailpod, tall, narrow, steep, and varied. Snow had fallen for weeks and weeks and the temperature had never broken freezing and powder had just piled up everywhere. In the waning light I hammered fastlaps, winding between Tamarack’s tree tunnels and full-bore meadows.
The idle T-bar offered a particularly nice line:
At 5:00, the Sitzmarker side opened. Milder terrain over here, big rollers, a bump line skier’s left beneath the chair:
The terrain far looker’s left didn’t open that day, and typically doesn’t on weekdays. Ski Buffalo Mountain’s trailmap is a gigantic tease, the tangled sort of pseudo-guide that you trust less as a literal wayfinder than as a promise of something different. A puzzle. A maze. A toy unboxed intact from some lost decade. A gigantic whole sewn from parts that fit but were perhaps not supposed to, like a late ‘80s red Chevy Blazer patched after an accident with a blue door removed from a wrecked relative. It keeps running even if it doesn’t quite make sense how.
I left Buffalo Ski Circus as dusk settled and the temperature ticked below zero. Just up the road lay Chestnut Ridge, a free muni ropetow that I’d hiked the year before. “Someone was here running the tow, but then they left,” a young Snowboard Bro told me as I arrived. A few other snowboarders trudged over the snow toward the lift, which, per the county’s website, should have been operating. This is exhibit A for why it’s so difficult to accurately count active ski areas: no staff, no signs, no social media accounts to cross-check. I stared down the hill I had hiked 11 months before, looked back at my warm car, which I’d left idling in the parking lot, thought about the six-plus-hour drive home and the aching shoulder that had transformed long drives into endurance contests. And I walked back to my van and changed out of my ski clothes and drove back toward the city in the long New York night.
More of my dumb ski adventures with Slopes:
Congrats on Brown, Wave!
Brown ain’t chopped liver and more difficult to access. Congratulations Waverly and all the best.