Vail Mountain, Extraordinary Even In A Terrible Winter
Vail Resorts' eponymous mountain is a worthy flagship
The Storm once again partnered with the Slopes ski tracker app to document my 2025-26 ski season. Click here for a free premium day pass for next winter.
Somewhere inside of all skiers lives a snowy kingdom all their own. This is the ski area they see in their dreams. It is made up of all the ski areas they’ve visited and all the ones they haven’t. It is nameless and shapeless and boundless. It is always snowing and it is always sunny. It is frantic and empty and it is sprawling and dense and it is retro and spectacularly modern. It soars above a town and it soars above the wilderness. It is familiar and mysterious, each part of it understood even at first encounter.
In America, and for American skiers, the most proximate reality to this fevered vision is Vail Mountain: 5,317 acres, 3,450 vertical feet, 32 lifts, including 18 detachable chairs and two gondolas. Frontside broadridge, three-and-a-half miles wide, crisscrossed trails and machinery erupting over the interstate, village pinched between. There are no cars. Skiers walk to the lifts with skis shoulder-hoisted past firepits and Bavarian restaurants and T-shirt shops. Two or three lifts to the top, depending on where you start and where you’re headed. Off the backside endless realms. A groomer track cut down the middle like a canal trenched through the wilderness and the bewildered 90 percent funnel into this. But for the skiers: ungroomed and spectacular everyterrain, forests and wide-opens. You can’t see to the bottom but there must be a bottom because lifts rise and fly around in all directions. Down to Blue Sky Basin. That mysterious wildworld. Powdery treed meadows, denser and more interesting than the Back Bowls, pitched for ass-hauling-without-summersaulting speed. The perfect ski terrain. It can take a couple of hours to get there and a couple of hours to get back but in those brief windows a skier experiences that videogame sensation of having stepped instantly across worlds.
DAY 20 – VAIL MOUNTAIN
On Sunday morning I woke up in Brooklyn and on Sunday afternoon I was skiing Vail Mountain. Making this miracle possible is a combination of three things. First, the two-hour timezone change when headed from the East Coast to the Rocky Mountains. Second, direct early-morning flights from JFK airport to Vail-Eagle airport, which are more expensive than Denver flights but just half an hour, typically without traffic, from the Vail and Beaver Creek ski areas. And, new to me on this trip, a luggage transport service called Ship Skis, which lowered the trip’s stress level to near zero by collecting ski bags, boot bags, and suitcases for four people in advance and shipping them to our hotel, sparing us the hassle of twice loading and unloading this dozen-bag hoard from taxis and rental cars; negotiating luggage drop around self-tagging systems that still, in 2026, can’t understand that one ski bag and one boot bag counts as one bag total; identifying the appropriate counter staffed with employees who are also aware of this policy; and then playing baggage carousel wait-and-dart upon arrival, a particularly fraught task in Vail-Eagle airport, at which nearly every passenger arrives with similar gear for the same purpose (it was, in fact, at Vail-Eagle airport where my land-and-ski plans were foiled when, in January 2024, an overzealous shuttle driver bunched my bootbag with those of his charges; the airline located the bag and delivered it to my hotel at Copper Mountain that evening, but long after the lifts had closed).
Ship Skis, I must disclose, reached out to ask if I’d like to trial their services, and we traded a pair of podcast reads for round-trip bag shipping from NYC to Colorado. The experience wasn’t without its quirks – the tagging process takes time (they mail you printed tags), the pickup address for our return hotel was wrong, and the shipping and return labels did not include our apartment number - a big deal if you live in NYC, where buildings can have hundreds of units (ours only has 22, but still, phone calls were required upon pickup; at dropoff, FedEx simply left all of our bags in our building’s lobby - it was several hours before I realized this). Ship Skis won’t deliver to hotels on weekends. And the service is more expensive than checking bags with the airline, especially since many of you double as Points Bro and probably own credit cards that zero-out bag charges (I’ll admit I do as well). But the gap between solo ski travel and ski travel with a family is like the difference between ordering a steak and butchering a cow, and over time I’ve accepted that my willingness to tolerate almost any inconvenience when I’m voyaging alone does not translate well to even minor hassles when I’m one of four humans attempting to cross a continent with the equivalent of a U-Haul divided between a dozen bags. And when that stack of bags disappeared from our living room several days before we took off for Colorado, and when I then left them piled in our hotel room at the end of the trip, it eliminated what has become a huge source of travel stress in the peak-kids era of my ski life. You can take 20 percent off your first Ship Skis with the code “STORMSKI” if you want to give it a try:
TLDR: I got to the hotels, put on my skis, and explored Vail Mountain:
DAY 21 – VAIL MOUNTAIN
If Vail Mountain were only the frontside, it would still be one of the more substantial ski areas in America: 22 lifts, three base areas, wild little terrain pockets hiding all over, far more left wild than groomed. And it’s a good thing the frontside could be its own ski area, because when we arrived in the second week of February, the frontside of Vail Mountain was the entire ski area, a scenario I couldn’t have imagined when booking this trip several months earlier.
Vail had offered a ski lesson to my son, Logan, age 9, so I could experience My Epic app’s parent-side ski school integrations, and I left him with his instructor at the top of Gondola 1.
I skied around. Despite a low winter, coverage was consistent top to bottom. And because of the low winter, crowds were light, with few liftlines worthy of the name. I’d skied Vail Mountain plenty, but always with a get-to-the-backside-as-soon-as-possible urgency. Reoriented with a Storm-centric mindset to assess the entire ski area and document as much of the operation as possible, I cruised in the bluebird morning. To the Eagle’s Nest summit beginner zone, where antique gondola cars double as conyeyor lift terminals:
And this wild, summer-only carpet:
I rode the Eagle Bahn Gondola and the Born Free Express quad. I skied the choppy, meandering lines beneath Pride Express and schussed top-to-bottom corduroy in Game Creek Bowl.
Before meeting my wife for lunch at The 10th restaurant at Mid-Vail, I squeezed in this run from the top of Wildwood, down meadows, bumps, and into a winding beat-snow canyon called Cady’s Café - a lightning tour that typifies Vail Mountain’s remarkable variety:
Throughout the day, Logan’s instructor sent photos through the My Epic app. After lunch, I met up with them for an afternoon tour.
In just a couple of hours, Logan had improved noticeably. His upper body was locked to the fall line as he linked crisp, symmetrical turns. The disconnect between his physical abilities and his psychological limitations seemed to have evaporated, and he no longer seemed to notice when the pitch steepened. Logan was not a novice skier, nor an unpracticed one: he’d skied between 15 and 25 days per year, on average, since age 5. Many of those days were in Mount Peter, New York’s seasonal ski program, with an instructor constantly present. But here, on a mountain that intimidates with its sprawl and its busyness and its endless maze of trails and lifts, he seemed to have leveled up over the course of a single morning.
That lesson came on day six of what would end up being a 26-day 2025-26 ski season for Logan, and he described his Vail ski school experience as foundational. “My biggest breakthrough of the year was at Vail,” Logan told me, when I asked him from Killington’s Ramshead chairlift on our last ski day of the season, what his biggest breakthrough had been that winter. “Before Vail, I did not have any confidence. At the Vail lesson, the main things I learned was confidence… I could not have done as good, with the skiing year I had this year, without the Vail lesson.” (By the way, I don’t coach Logan, who’s kind of a natural sound-bite machine, on what to say for these Instagram #LoganOnTheLift videos; I just asked him to reflect on the season, and the Vail lesson experience is what poured out.)
At day’s end, the instructor typed a summary of skills, progress, and goals into the app – which Logan’s next instructor could tap into as a starting line. That’s a big improvement over the traditional handwritten summary booklet, a cute document that is nonetheless almost always immediately lost in the chaos of children, motion, baggage, and travel.
Ski school integration into the My Epic app helped to resolve another administrative pain in the ass, which was the chaos of early-morning ski school dropoff. Rather than navigate lines of equally confused families queued up for waiver hell, we simply met Logan’s instructor at Gondola 1, rode up to Mid-Vail together, and said goodbye until lunchtime.
The Epic Ski School features were new this past season, and available only at Vail’s four biggest Colorado ski areas. But the company is planning a rollout to 11 additional ski areas for winter 2026-27. While Vail plans to “continue to enhance the experience with additional features based on guest feedback and learnings about what they value most,” according to a Vail Resorts spokesperson, no substantive changes are planned for 2026-27. I would suggest the following long-term upgrades:
Live-tracking of students via parent’s My Epic App throughout the day
Ability to message the instructor via the app (we communicated via text)
Ability to book lessons via the app
Transparency to browse and select specific instructors
A private daylong ski lesson at Vail Mountain is, I realize, a rarified experience, but the features described above are integrated with group lessons as well.
DAY 22 – BEAVER CREEK
I’ll provide more detail in a separate post, but here’s the Slopes overview:
DAY 23 – VAIL MOUNTAIN
Sometime that week, Vail’s Back Bowls opened. Which is to say, mountain ops nailed together a good-enough road through the potholed and exposed-rock expanse of Vail’s backside so that skiers could funnel through the south-facing bowls to access Blue Sky Basin. This has long been my favorite part of Vail, and as snow dumped all morning, we skied east toward Sourdough, where I led my son and his cousin down China Bowl’s Poppy Fields superhighway to Blue Sky.
Blue Sky Basin feels like an independent backwater tacked onto America’s most corporate-identified resort. Like “what’s that?” “Oh those trails up after the Back Bowls?” “Yeah.” “Well that’s Bill’s ski area.” “Bill?” “Yeah.” “Who’s Bill?” “Oh just some dude who started building lifts over there.” “And he lets everyone ski there?” “Yeah Bill’s a hell of a nice fellow, but don’t fuck with his raccoons because he’s got a thing about that.” I mean it’s not exactly Silverton: a trio of high-speed quads serve Blue Sky Basin and groomed routes sweep summit-to-base from all the lifts, but the experience is pit-toilets backwoods, with a few snack shacks that feel decades away from the glimmering Two Elk Lodge atop the Back Bowls or The 10th at Mid-Vail.
But the best part of skiing Blue Sky Basin is the terrain, which is mostly untamed and almost entirely skiable. It’s not too mild and not too extreme. Some years earlier, blind snowstorm charging an unnamed-on-the-trailmap meadow skier’s right off Skyline Express lift, I’d sailed off an unmarked 10-foot drop, kept my feet in the sloppy, impromptu landing, and kept skiing into the unmarked glades ramping back down toward the lifts. Unlike the wilder parts of, say, Snowbird or Palisades Tahoe, Blue Sky keeps you alert but doesn’t try very hard to kill you.
More terrain was open in Blue Sky than in the Back Bowls, but the best tracts were still roped off. Still, even Blue Sky’s marked and groomed trails are delightful, undulating mazes winding through pinestands with little booters ramping up all over.
We had a lunch date, so we hitched a ride up Orient Express to meet the rest of our group on the frontside.
Vail Mountain moves skiers around with one of America’s beefiest lift networks: two gondolas, four six-packs, and 14 high-speed quads. Adding in fixed-grip chairs and surface lifts, Vail’s fleet totals 32 machines, the fifth-most among U.S. ski areas. Thirteen of these measure longer than one mile, and 12 arrived new this century.
It’s a beefy but understated fleet. Unlike Boyne’s mountains, which exclusively buy from Doppelmayr, or Aspen’s, which are Leitner-Poma partisans, Vail Mountain is comfortable with a mix: nine Doppelmayr lifts and 13 Pomas, with a handful of legacy brands mixed in. There are no bubbles or heated seats. There is nothing like Jackson’s tram etched against the Tetons or Big Sky’s D-Line eight- and six-packs with their LED screens and loading carpets and heated seats and whisper-whoosh rides up the mountain.
But Vail Mountain does have one lift that qualifies as quirky and memorable. On the far western edge of the frontside, down a thin narrow trail kept deliberately discreet, is the oldest chairlift at Vail Mountain, and the sixth-tallest fixed-grip machine in Vail’s U.S. lift fleet: the Cascade Village quad. It is the steepest lift on the mountain, one of just three fixed-grip chairs, and the only fixed-grip quad. It is a lappable ski lift, but it is not designed to work that way. Cascade functions, rather, as a transit lift, freighting skiers away from the Cascade lodging hub and back downhill at day’s end. The irony is that, of Vail Mountain’s 15 quad chairs, Cascade is the least-equipped to accommodate downhill loading. Lacking the automatic in-terminal slowdowns that define detachable chairlift mechanics, Cascade moves at the whims of human operators, stopping frequently and moving at grass-growing speeds for long stretches.
I rode Cascade that day only because I had never bothered, and because this was my first time skiing Vail Resorts’ mothership since launching The Storm, and because I now feel some duty to go around riding all these dumb little marginal lifts. It’s actually a pretty scenic ride:
Vail Mountain’s masterplan calls for replacing this machine with a detach quad, which is a sensible but ungodly expensive village-to-terrain connection, and one that begs for alternatives: a cabriolet? A mini-tram? A funicular? A pulse gondola? A train? An elevator? A T-bar? At Big Sky, Boyne repurposed a circa-1955 Riblet double from its Brighton resort to act as the 71-vertical-foot, 922-foot-long Little Thunder transit lift, which serves a handful of lower-mountain homes. I wonder if Vail couldn’t somehow repurpose and lengthen the 2,705-foot-long Cabriolet lift that they’re removing from Park City this summer to serve Cascade’s 3,497-foot line? If that sounds ridiculous, I’d like to introduce you to the Cabriolet at Mountain Creek, New Jersey, which rises 850 vertical feet along a 3,639-foot line:
Yes, it’s ridiculous, but Mountain Creek officials point out that the Cabriolet is one of the most efficient lifts in skiing, and that lines longer than a few minutes rarely form at the base of the lift, even on the resort’s busiest days - and New Jersey busy would give nightmares to anyone accustomed to the relative order of the big-mountain West.
DAY 24 – BRECKENRIDGE
Again, Breck deserves its own post, so I’ll just leave you with a Slopes preview:
DAY 25 – VAIL MOUNTAIN
There is a version of Past Stu that heat-seeks the gnar, that has no patience for Sourdough laps until the Back Bowls open, that refuses to ski a groomer if given any alternative. I admire Past Stu’s enthusiasm, but Past Stu did not have kids, a collection of orthopedic traumas commemorated with permanent body implants, a platform from which to broadcast ski news and a concomitant requirement to understand the whole ski area rather than just the parts that ignite the most adrenaline. But I do think Past Stu would appreciate that Future Stu gets to ski a lot more often than Past Stu, and that he’s still skiing that often as he approaches 50. Past Stu would also appreciate Future Stu’s lunch budget, which while not exactly extravagant at least exists. Anyway, here is Future Stu and one-day-to-be Past Logan lapping the beautiful Sourdough pod while we waited for the Back Bowls to open:
They took a long time to open. We skied around, hit Game Creek Bowl, grabbed lunch at Two Elk. But finally – laps on Blue Sky Basin. Just glorious fun, Man:
My wife had been working down in the hotel as we skied, and had moved to a downstairs office post-check-out. As the valets loaded our bags, they found a flat tire on our rented Jeep Wagoneer, drove it down to a local service station, and had the whole thing repaired at no charge before they even notified us. That’s the kind of stressor that could have turned the whole trip upside-down. The Lodge at Vail if you need them.
Previous 2025-26 winter Storm adventures, brought to you by Slopes:
