Killington was one of the first areas to acknowledge the discrete charm, and needs, of the novice skier. The development of Snowshed was groundbreaking stuff an entire sub-area dedicated to beginners and novices. It was an immediate hit, as the three lifts capable of carrying 5,400 skiers an hour up Snowshed's meager 525 vertical feet attests. (For comparison, consider the Bear Mountain Quad's lift capacity: just 2,400 skiers an hour on more than double the vertical rise.)
Obviously, the Snowshed experience does not elicit that private, in-woods sense of skiing New England, but that's not the point. This is a learning hill, and Killington's ski school, notable for its courting of innovations such as the Graduated Length Method (no longer in use), is among the best anywhere.
Killington's trail layout is designed so that novices (not beginners) have a way of making their way down from any of the area's six summits. Smart planning there, but I pass that info along with a couple of caveats. First, the pitch on some runs e.g., Juggernaut, which meanders off the back of Killington Peak is so slight that if you don't keep up your speed, you're likely to end up walking in places, especially when warm weather makes the snow slushy. Second, trails such as Great Eastern and Rim Run, are widely used by upper-level skiers as connector trails. The bottlenecks that form around the Killington summit can make for slick and disconcerting skiing if you are a novice, even if the trails are rated green.
One other thing to be careful about is sticking to novice trails. At an area with so many intersections, making a wrong turn onto terrain that overmatches your ability is a constant threat. Recognizing this, the area has put up signs and uses a symbol system (i.e., follow the red snowflakes for the easiest way down from Killington Peak). Personally, I think this is information overload; most of us are used to following trail names, so why not simply have novice routes that keep the same trail name from top to bottom? Perhaps all the extra trail names help boost the official trail count; however, having to link together trails of three or four different names while looking out for easiest-route symbols strikes me as an unnecessarily complicated process for novices to deal with.
Among the novice trails that do stick with the same name top to bottom is Juggernaut, at 10 miles the longest officially designated trail in the East. Even for the novice, this is basically a scenic ramble more than it is a ski. I wouldn't recommend it unless your fully committed to a leisurely pace: the ski down and the process of riding the lifts back up is guaranteed to take more than an hour, with little legitimate skiing involved. All you need to do is a little calculation: 10 miles on 3,100 vertical feet produces an average pitch somewhere under 6 percent.
Nothing wrong with that, but if you're a novice who really wants to ski and you've passed the Snowshed test, your next best stop is Rams Head, a short walk across Killington Road. The combination of Horn, Caper, and lower Great Bear, or Horn to lower Header, are among the best long novice routes in the East. Another route that ranks right up there is upper Pipe Dream to Wanderer off the Sun Ridge chair.
