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© Dina Mishev for The Washington Post Snow King Mountain rises 1,500 feet above the town of Jackson, Wyo. When it opened in 1939, Snow King was the first ski resort in the state.Most of my best ski days have been at destination ski areas. I’ve gotten bell to bell face shots of champagne powder at Steamboat Springs, ripped groomer after groomer under a cloudless sky at Beaver Creek and racked up insane amounts of vertical at Jackson Hole. But it’s small ski areas that have changed my life.
The definition of “small” in the context of ski resorts can be hard to pin down. “It can even be different depending on the skier you’re talking with,” Adrienne Saia Isaac, director of marketing and communications at the National Ski Areas Association, emailed me. The organization classifies resorts as small, medium, large or extra large. To do this, it uses a metric related to lift capacity and vertical transportation feet per hour that’s so esoteric not one of the resorts I asked could tell me what theirs was.
[Why and how to plan next year’s epic ski trip]But it’s more about heart than statistics — a scrappy base lodge, lifts so slow you learn to enjoy the journey as much as the destination, knowing patrollers by name, a general lack of amenities (which encourages bringing your own lunch and snacks), a parking lot, maybe even dirt, that doesn’t require a shuttle to get to the slopes. These smaller-scale, regional outfits are enjoying a surge in popularity during the pandemic because they’re often less crowded than destination ski resorts.
On Feb. 15, Bluebird Backcountry will open near Steamboat Springs, Colo., with zero lifts, 1,500 acres of terrain, a 2,200-foot vertical drop and no more than 300 skiers a day. That’s small in one way. Liberty Mountain Resort, one of the closest ski areas to D.C., is only 100 acres and 620 vertical feet, but has eight lifts. Small in a different way.
But in terms of impact on skiers and their lives? They’re all big.
“Small ski areas are so important to the soul of skiing,” Isaac wrote. “[They] are where many people learn, where kids experience snow for the first time, where the culture of skiing is rich and the people there are dedicated to their home hill.”
Small ski areas and the experiences they engender — funky, funny, familial — have consistently been the backdrops in the timeline of my life.
1976
A gangly, brown-haired 6-year-old boy named Derek puts skis on for the first time at Pats Peak in Henniker, N.H., a short drive from his home near Concord. Built by the four Patenaude brothers on 200 acres of mountain they bought from their father, Merle, the ski area had opened only 13 years before. It has two chairlifts and a lodge made from lumber from trees cut to make the ski runs. (Some of the largest beams were hewed at the family’s sawmill.) The bunny slopes — the area of any ski resort specifically designed for beginners with wide, flat runs — frustrate Derek terribly and when his mother comes to pick him up, he tells her he never wants to ski again. But it turns out that Derek’s younger brother, with whom he has a robustly competitive relationship, loves skiing, so Derek sticks with it, creating the potential for us to meet on the summit of a small ski area 37 years later.
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1987
My first time skiing is not auspicious. On my third run, a toddler whose skiing skills vastly outshine my own zips between my legs as I snowplow down the easiest run at Ski Liberty (now Liberty Mountain Resort) in the Alleghenies. Having recently studied mountains — the American Rockies and the Himalayas — in my seventh-grade geology class, I take issue with the Alleghenies being mountains, even though Liberty’s 1,190-foot summit is the tallest I’ve ever seen. The last run of the day I throw caution to the wind and abandon the beginner lifts in the base area in favor of the chairlift to the top. A vast and impressive view greets me, although it does little to sway me from thinking these are hills and not mountains. Still, having 360-degree views from a vantage point higher than everything else around makes my stomach queasy in a good way.
© Liberty Mountain Resort In seventh grade, the author was introduced to skiing at Ski Liberty (now Liberty Mountain Resort) in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Mountains. She took a chairlift to the resort’s 1,190-foot summit.1991
On a sunny spring weekend, the whole family skis together for the first time (and, not that I know this at the time, for the last time). The day before, Mom and Dad sat through a three-hour presentation on timesharing available at Massanutten Resort so the family can enjoy a “free” three-day vacation at this 70-acre ski area in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. While they got the hard sell from a mulleted man in a three-piece suit, my younger brother, Rob, and I lingered around the several arcade games in the base area lodge. Finally on the slopes, as with most sports, Mom is a natural and quickly masters the beginner “green” runs, but not Dad. “My ankles aren’t meant for this,” he says every time he attempts to snowplow and, instead of coming to a stop, spins 180 degrees and is left to slide down the slope backward. If I hadn’t seen what he can do with a soccer ball, I’d think him hopeless at sports. Skiing is the first thing Rob and I are better at than Mom and Dad.
1992
Because it’s organized by the teen group at a friend’s church, my parents okay a weekend ski trip with friends to Seven Springs, outside Pittsburgh. At 300-some acres, Seven Springs is the biggest resort I’ve ever skied at by at least a factor of three. Its high point, at 2,994 feet above sea level, sets a record for me. Riding the lift to this high point, something I didn’t know was possible happens: The individual hairs inside my nose freeze. Since Seven Springs is still years away from having six terrain parks, including the only 22-foot Superpipe on the East Coast, when my friends and I are finished skiing for the day, we construct our own ramps out of snow and sled off them on lunch trays borrowed from a base-area cafeteria.
1995
For every 20-second run down the 190 vertical feet from the summit of Wisconsin’s Wilmot Mountain to its base area, I spend five minutes riding the lift. Still, on a Friday night I’d rather make the 90-minute trip to the (self-titled) “Matterhorn of the Midwest” from my university than go to a frat party. Wilmot’s slopes are glacial sediment deposited about 18,000 to 15,000 years ago when two lobes of the massive ice sheet that covered much of Canada and the northern United States collided. In 1938, this sediment made for rich farmland, but Walter Stopa thought this particular hill had a higher purpose than agriculture. He rented it from a farmer, and Wilmot Hills opened. Wilmot has the lowest summit of any resort I’ve been to, but the longest history.
© iStock The author moved to Jackson Hole, Wyo., because of its proximity to the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. But the smaller Snow King Resort was so close to the office where she worked that she could ski there on her lunch hour.1997
Halfway through a gap year between college and starting law school, I’ve now been a Wyomingite, specifically a resident of Jackson Hole, for four months. My goal is to advance from an intermediate to an all-mountain skier. It was because of the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort that I moved here, but it is Snow King Mountain that is five blocks from the office where I work as a paralegal. The mountain rises 1,500 feet above downtown Jackson, and I can ski there on my lunch hour. (Jackson is the largest town in the valley of Jackson Hole.) While Jackson Hole Mountain Resort has far eclipsed Snow King in size and amenities, the King was actually here first. It was the first ski resort in Wyoming, opening in 1939 with a rope tow powered by a Ford tractor. I eat a PowerBar for lunch while riding up a lift named for the man who installed that rope tow, Neil Rafferty. The Rafferty Lift takes me to the resort’s main intermediate area, but the runs back to the bottom are steeper than any advanced run I’ve seen before.
[Local cross-country skiing can smooth a bumpy winter’s ups and downs]2002
I have not gone to law school, nor left Jackson. I am continuing my education though — learning how to telemark ski, a style of skiing that originated in the Telemark region of Norway more than a century ago and combines elements of Alpine and cross-country skiing. You use skis with edges, but only your toes (and not your heels) are attached to the ski via bindings. This requires a different type of turn while descending. Quad-intensive, a telemark turn is somewhere between a curtsy and a lunge. Done right, it feels like dancing down the mountain. In the two years I’ve been learning to telemark, I’ve felt like I was dancing exactly 2½ times. In addition to providing a new challenge — not that I have yet met the challenge of becoming a confident all-mountain skier on traditional Alpine skis — telemark skiing allows you to ski uphill. With mohair climbing skins attached to the bottoms of skis, telemark skiers can ski up mountains, also called “skinning,” freeing them from requiring ski lifts. Like many big ski resorts, Jackson Hole Mountain Resort does not allow uphill skiing. Snow King does, though, and I’m skinning up before its lifts have opened for the day. At the top, I’ll take my skins off, make hesitant telemark turns back to the base and be at my desk by 9 a.m.
2007
I’m lost. Recently married, but also recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS), a degenerative neurological disease, I take three hours to summon the motivation and energy to drive the four minutes between my couch and the base of Snow King. Since starting to ski uphill, it has become my meditation. The slow, rhythmic sliding of my skis on snow through trees that were here when this valley was still the domain of Native Americans clears my mind and helps my mood like few other things can. I know this, yet for two months now, I just can’t. Crying — on the couch, lying in bed, under hot water in the shower — is easier. I have never been so confused — where’s my newly wedded bliss? — nor felt so helpless, anxious, or broken. Today I rally but do not have the energy to both skin and keep my crying in check. Tears stream down my face as I load my gear into my car, step into my skis at the base of the Rafferty lift and start, slowly, up the mountain. Leaving the base area, I do not think I will make it the full 1,500 vertical feet to the mountain’s summit, and that’s okay. I made it out of the house.
© Provided by The Washington Post© Provided by The Washington Post2009
I’m no longer depressed — it went away within a month of starting on Wellbutrin — but still have MS. (There is no cure for MS.) It is because of the latter that I am competing in a 24-hour uphill skiing race at Sunlight Mountain, a small resort in the White River National Forest down valley from the larger resorts of Aspen and Snowmass in Colorado. The race is meant to raise awareness of Can Do MS, founded by 1964 U.S. Olympic skier (and bronze medalist) Jimmie Heuga, who was diagnosed with MS in 1970. At the time of Heuga’s diagnosis, the medical community believed people with MS should avoid physical stress. Heuga thought differently and stayed as physically active as he could, finding that exercise, along with nutrition, improved his health. (This has since become the conventional wisdom.) Can Do MS promotes the ideas that staying active and keeping positive about the disease can ultimately improve the lives of those living with the disease. I agree with this so strongly that I’m doing the race solo, skinning up and then down Sunlight Mountain as many times as I can in 24 hours. My husband and a friend are also competing as a team of two. Speeding down the Beaujolais run under a full moon at the end of my 16th lap, I’ve got about eight hours to go and have little doubt about making it the full 24 hours. Having MS has become a huge motivator for me — who knows how long my body will be capable of something like this? — and my support crew at the base includes my mom, sister-in-law, friends and my brother, who flew in all the way from Paris to help.
2011
While my soon-to-be ex-husband is moving out of our house, I’ve removed myself to Eagle Point, a newly reopened 600-acre ski area in the Tushar Mountains above the one-stoplight town of Beaver, Utah. It’s been a week since the last snowstorm, but with an average of fewer than 100 skiers a day, there’s still plenty of untracked powder to distract myself from what’s happening back in Wyoming. Also distracting is the strong skiing of the local farm kids in camo and Carhartts.
2013
African American Speed Dating Eagle Point Pleasant
At the summit of Snow King, which I’ve decided has the best views of any summit I’ve ever stood on even if it’s not that tall (7,808 feet above sea level), the boy who started skiing at Pats Peak in 1976 says “Hi” to me. We start talking. Despite both of us having lived in Jackson, where the year-round population isn’t that much greater than its elevation (6,237 feet), and skied on Snow King for at least 15 years, we’ve never met before. At the bottom — I let him leave the summit first so I can watch him ski — Derek suggests we get coffee sometime. “How about dinner?” I reply.
2015
My mom’s skiing days ended at Massanutten, but she’s at Snow King with Derek. I had planned to go snow tubing with them, but halfway through six chemotherapy treatments for Stage 3 breast cancer, today is not a good day.
2019
At the end of a wonderfully normal day, Derek and I head over to Snow King. The lifts are closed, but that’s fine because we’re skinning up. Just below an aged pine tree so distinguishable from all others because of the thickness and vibrancy of the hairy moss encircling its trunk that I, years ago, named it Tom Selleck, Derek surprises me: “We should get married at the top when there’s a gondola.” “Why wait for something neither of us is that excited about to be built?” I ask, thinking back on our numerous conversations about how a high-speed, comfortable, enclosed lift to the summit will fundamentally change the King’s no-frills, low-key vibe.
“Can you see your Uncle Gus riding the existing lift?”
“Fair point.”
2020
Snow King receives approval for the gondola and announces it will be finished for the 2021/2022 ski season.
2021
Derek and I both buy new ski boots. His are black, mine white. They’ll look great at the wedding.
Mishev is a writer based in Jackson Hole, Wyo. Her website is dinamishev.com. Find her on Instagram: @myspiritanimalisatrex.
Please NotePotential travelers should take local and national public health directives regarding the pandemic into consideration before planning any trips. Travel health notice information can be found on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's interactive map showing travel recommendations by destination and the CDC's travel health notice web page.
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To begin the morning, we provide you with a delicious breakfast snack to enjoy on the way. Your first destination of the day will be about halfway to the canyon. You will enjoy a 1 hour stop just off of Route 66 at the historic Grand Canyon Caverns. Here, you will be able to get your fresh deli lunch, relax, or explore further with a guided 40-minute tour of the caverns. This optional underground tour takes you into the amazing natural caverns to see their incredible features and learn about their history and formation. Once this stop is complete, you will board your luxury bus again to complete the drive to the Grand Canyon.
At Grand Canyon West, you will ride the shuttle to the first lookout, Eagle Point. The incredible view of the eagle shaped rock formation is something that can only be truly appreciated in person. At Eagle Point there is a Native American Indian Village which demonstrates some living dwellings used by Native American tribes in times of old. The Skywalk and Skywalk gift shop are also located at Eagle Point.
The next stop is Guano Point, which you have probably seen in movies without even realizing it. The views at this point are completely different than Eagle Point, but maybe even more impressive. If you like hike along the dirt trail along the edge at Guano Point provides for spectacular views from different angles.
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be aware that the price for admission to the Skywalk is NOT included in our tour. Skywalk entry is available to purchase as an add on.
A fresh deli sandwich lunch meal is included with your tour.
After visiting Guano Point you will return to the Welcome Center and head back to Las Vegas.
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During some stretches our driver guide will play videos for you to enjoy while passing the time.
The return time to Las Vegas is approximately 5:30 PM.