DO you know which state has the most ski
areas?
It’s not Colorado, Vermont, Utah, California or New
Hampshire, though those are the usual suspects.
The answer is New York. But somehow New York’s
44 ski areas attract a sliver of the attention given mountains elsewhere.
And on any given winter weekend, the surge of skiers and snowboarders
on the Eastern Seaboard who point their cars north toward New England
and speed past New York’s ski areas is staggering.
There’s nothing wrong with those New England
resorts. Many are icons, and deserve to be. But if you live in the East,
especially in and around New York City, that’s no reason to overlook
slopes that are as close, if not closer. If the average ski family makes
three trips a season, why make all three to New England? And if you’re
traveling East, New York’s areas will reward a close look.
It’s not as if New York’s resorts are
considered inferior. Among the most devoted skiers and snowboarders,
New York’s winter resorts are far from a secret. In Ski magazine’s
most recent annual ranking of Eastern ski resorts, Whiteface Mountain
outside Lake Placid came in No. 3 and Holiday Valley in Ellicottville
was No. 5. Only two New England resorts, Smuggler’s Notch at No.
2 and Stowe at No. 4 (both in Vermont), were ranked higher.
And it’s not as if New York’s ski areas
lacked cachet or credentials. Whiteface was host to the 1980 Winter
Olympics races and Lake Placid was home to both the 1980 and 1932 Winter
Olympics. Whiteface has the largest vertical drop (3,430 feet) of any
resort east of the Rockies, yet it attracts about 200,000 skier visits
annually, or roughly a fourth the number who visit the largest New England
resorts.
How is that possible?
“People mention skiing in Vermont and everyone
thinks of white church steeples, village greens and a romantic country
atmosphere,” said Sandy Caligiore, communications director for
the state-run Olympic Regional Development Authority, which manages
Whiteface (www.whiteface.com) and Gore Mountain (www.goremountain.com),
another large ski area outside Lake George. “When someone says
New York, they think of Manhattan and skyscrapers. Someone says New
York skiing and somebody else thinks: How good can that be? But it’s
a big state. It’s mostly country villages and big mountains.”
Having grown up in New England, and having lived
the last 20 years in New York, I’ve been in a good position to
hear just about every reason, or excuse, for overlooking New York’s
abundance of snowy trails.
Reason No. 1: Those mountains are too hard to get
to.
True, there’s no major highway that drops visitors
off at spots like Hunter (www.huntermtn.com), Belleayre (www.belleayre.com),
Plattekill (www.plattekill.com) or Windham (www.windhammountain.com)
in the Catskills. But that’s also true for Stratton, Okemo, Mount
Snow, Mad River Glen and nearly every other Vermont and Massachusetts
ski area. Perception is part of the problem.
The Catskill ski areas are closer and easier to get
to than many of their competitors, even if a lot of people in the New
York metropolitan area, the largest skiing and snowboarding market in
the nation, don’t think so. So is Gore Mountain, a vastly underestimated
gem of a mountain. And then there is Whiteface; some people seem to
think it’s in the suburbs of Montreal. It’s actually about
280 miles from Manhattan, which makes it a shorter drive than the trek
to central Vermont.
Reason No. 2: It’s too cold and icy at the
New York mountains.
This may have actually been true during some of the
snowless winters of the 1980s. It’s also true that lifts once
moved so slowly they would give you a blanket so you survived the trip.
Things change. New snow-making technologies, advanced grooming and fast
lifts have remade the Eastern ski industry. Hunter Mountain has more
than 1,100 snow guns that can blanket the entire trail system in a week
of cold days. Belleayre has five of the latest grooming machines that
can freshen 120 miles of terrain in a single night. Mount Peter (www.mtpeter.com),
a small, family ski area only 50 miles from Manhattan in Warwick, can
make enough snow to be open from mid-December to March. Dozens of New
York ski areas, like Greek Peak (www.greekpeak.net) outside Cortland,
do a booming night-skiing business.
People used to derisively refer to Whiteface as “Iceface.”
On Dec. 26, I was skiing in powder — yes, powder — on a
Whiteface trail called Draper’s Drop. When we got to the bottom
of the trail, my 14-year-old daughter, Elise, turned to me in happy
wonder and said: “How can people call this place Iceface?”
Reason No. 3: New York mountains are too hard.
This reason is given about as often as another reason:
New York mountains are too easy. So obviously, both statements are true.
Some New York mountains are tame for an expert. Some are very, very
challenging. Most are a mix. This is called variety. There are day-trip
ski areas and weekend destinations. There is something for everyone.
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Reason No. 4: New York
mountains lack lodging choices and something else — an authentic
ski town ethos.
Lodging has been a problem for a few New York areas,
but at Hunter and Windham, for example, new residential developments have
addressed many of those shortfalls. Belleayre plans a huge on-mountain
real estate project. Developers also can’t wait to get started on
accommodations at Gore Mountain as it expands and extends links to the
newly reopened ski bowl at North Creek. For most of the last decade, lodging
options at all the larger New York mountains have been improved.
And if it’s ski-town ambience that visitors want,
an examination of the enchanting New York villages of Lake Placid and
Ellicottville should end any debate concerning authenticity. On a visit
to each village during the December holidays, it was as if I had been
transported to a scene from an old black-and-white Christmas movie.
In Lake Placid, 10 miles from Whiteface, shop owners
stood on the narrow Main Street sidewalks greeting visitors and village
regulars alike, sometimes with free cups of hot chocolate. There were
shopping, dining, pubs, hotels and an away-from-it-all, Adirondack feel.
As snow fell, dozens of skaters circled a 400-meter
skating oval in the middle of the village. While a lot of winter resorts
offer skating, how many let you skate on the oval that was the site for
Eric Heiden’s five gold medals for speed skating in the 1980 Olympics?
And, yes, that was a pack of dogs you saw pulling a sled earlier in the
day.
At Whiteface, small children auditioned their newfound
snow skills at the learning area as their parents sat at the bottom in
Adirondack chairs, smiling in the sun as they clapped and pointed at the
toddlers. More than 3,000 feet above them, viewed from the top of the
summit chairlift, those people back at the base lodge looked like ants.
From this spot, you could test yourself on the very downhill race courses
contested in the ’80 Olympics.
If you looked carefully around the summit, you might
notice someone wearing a United States Ski Team jacket. On Christmas Eve,
Andrew Weibrecht, a 21-year-old American ski-racing rookie, was back on
his home mountain. Mr. Weibrecht grew up in Lake Placid, proof that the
challenges of Whiteface are not just for those pretending to be Olympians
(as fun as that may be).
Mr. Weibrecht’s parents, Ed and Lisa, own the
Mirror Lake Inn Resort and Spa in Lake Placid, one of the finest high-end
lodging choices in all of snow country. That’s not just my opinion.
Readers surveyed by Condé Nast Traveler magazine named three Lake
Placid properties (Mirror Lake, Whiteface Lodge and Lake Placid Lodge)
among the top 50 ski hotels in North America.
Ellicottville, about 50 miles south of Buffalo, is
an unpretentious town where everyone feels welcome. Locals, weekenders
and tourists from Ohio, Pennsylvania and Canada create a diverse scene
in the restaurants, shops and galleries and at the two nearby ski areas,
Holiday Valley (www.holidayvalley.com) and HoliMont (www.holimont.com),
a private 50-trail ski area that is open to the public weekdays and reserved
for members and guests on weekends.
Holiday Valley’s 56 trails, many gentle or intermediate,
are an enjoyable mix. There are on-mountain lodging, condos, bed-and-breakfasts
and seemingly a game of checkers or dominos going on in every lobby or
common area you might stroll through. At night, this unusual skiing demographic
cheerfully melds in a snug New York village that includes late-night live-music
spots that stay open until the wee hours.
Refreshingly, it is a decidedly middle class, or at
least unassuming, crowd that is drawn to 50-year-old Holiday Valley, which
never needed a golden anniversary to embrace its history. The owners have
kept many traditions at Holiday Valley, including the gathering spot in
the woods beside one trail where the regular clientele has assembled in
front of an old wooden lean-to and fire pit for spirited parties since
the 1960s. About two weeks ago, a young man approached the mountain management
for permission to start the bonfire early so he could propose to his girlfriend.
At homey Holiday Valley, they never forgot what keeps people
coming back to a ski area, and that might just be a sense of belonging.
Take a look inside the resort’s Tannenbaum Lodge, where the lower
half of the walls are ringed with extra electrical outlets.
“People have always liked to bring Crock-Pots
with home-cooked meals,” said Jane Eshbaugh, the resort’s
director of marketing. “It’s something they’ve done
here for decades. So we put in the extra plugs. It wasn’t easy,
but we knew it was the right thing to do.”
Now, doesn’t that sound like a nice comfy place
to settle down for the weekend?
Wherever you are, and it can be many places throughout
the country, a great skiing day gives you a chance to sit back and appreciate
the many blessings of a winter sports avocation.
It’s really a state of mind. The important point
is, there are more than just a few states where that can be achieved.
Enjoy them all.
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