Getting to Know New England Skiing

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Follow me back to a day in March, many years ago. The names of people, the exact date, even the year have long since washed from my conscious recollection. What I can still dredge from memory is that the day was warm, that the place was Mad River Glen in central Vermont, that I had hooked up with three hot-skiing Mad Riverites, and that we were skiing"Fall Line," a steep and serpentine quirk of a trail.

Fall Line is New England skiing at its finest and its meanest, a combination of narrow trail skiing and tree skiing through changing pitches and fall lines, over a surface mix of snow, ice, roots, and rock. It can alternately exhilarate the senses and lay to waste one's skis, body, and ego.

My skiing partners of the moment knew things I didn't: the precise location of rocks and frozen rivulets, the best lines through mogul fields, preferred traverses, and so on. As I followed in their tracks, they reinvented the trail for me. Their route selection down Fall Line was one of rhythm and relative ease. It had nothing to do with the rock-bashing, side-slipping battle against the trail's demons that would have been my own, unescorted method. For that brief moment, I had become one of the anointed— a skier blessed with the insider's edge.

Perhaps your own skiing memories include similar chance encounters on the slopes; you hooked up with someone— a local skier, most likely— who showed you how to bring out the best in a trail or mountain. If so, you are intimately aware of how insider info— knowing what those in the know know— can be a passport of sorts, an entry into a land of privilege. It's like getting a box seat for the price of general admission; it's valet parking, gratis; it is like being whisked to the best table in the house.

It's also more than knowing the right line down a trail like Fall Line, although that's a large part of it. It's knowing where to park the car, where and when to avoid lift lines, which trails have the best skiing depending on the weather and time of year, knowing where to get a decent meal without getting ripped off, and so on. It prescribes fun, but it goes beyond that. With the arrival of the $40 lift ticket, it promises a better return on your investment in a sport that even people in the business of skiing— people who set ticket prices— concede is getting painfully expensive. They have said so to me.

I'm into my fourth decade of New England skiing, qualifying me as a New England insider in a backwards way: I have many years of experience in doing pretty much everything wrong that can possibly be done wrong. I've dressed wrong, skied the wrong areas at the wrong time, had the wrong equipment, and so on. I'm very familiar with the misery that New England skiing can be: the cold toes and fingers, the slow stampede of holiday lift lines, snow with less edge grip than the windshield of my Honda. There have been moments when New England skiing has utterly defeated me, literally bringing me to tears.

The pay-off, though, is that I'm now a lot more savvy about doing things right. And I've come through whatever misery I've experienced with an enduring, even feisty, appreciation for all that New England skiing is. I feel my skin warm with combativeness when I hear skiers disparage New England alongside the great mountains and snows found in other parts of the world. I defy them. I know that New England skiing can, in its unique way, stand alongside skiing anywhere else in the world in quality, challenge, and natural beauty. Yes— I'm saying that New England can march in the same band as the Alps, the Rockies, and the Sierras. If you say no way, I say: Read on.

Why New England?

When people think New England, they often think small-mountain skiing. Obviously the mountains of New England lack the elevation or bulk of the Rockies or the Alps. But let's compare ski areas, not just mountains. Compare ski-area vertical rises: Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine have 14 areas with more than 2,000 feet of vertical rise, the same number (and in closer proximity to one another) as in Colorado, and six more than in Utah.

I've used 2,000 feet as a figure only to make a point; realistically, that's more mountain than most skiers want anyway. Whether in New England, Europe, or the U.S. West, skiers rarely use up more than 1,800 vertical feet in a single run. New England differs from other regions not so much in the length but in the character of its runs. Trail skiing is New England's forte, meaning that the experience of skiing New England is principally one of skiing along corridors cut from trees.

That's a far cry, to be sure, from skiing the more open terrain of the Rockies, Sierras, and Alps. I've certainly put in enough time skiing the bowls, chutes, and slopes of the big-mountain regions to know how pleasurable that experience can be. So I'm not suggesting New England trail skiing is any better than all that. But if you enjoy, as I do, the combination of physical challenge and mind game that trail skiing presents, New England is the place you should be.

"Trail skiing," of course, can mean a lot of things. It used to mean navigating your way down ultra-narrow squiggles on the mountainside. The first trails of more than 50 years ago had to be hand-cut, and producing a trail much wider than the average New England back road called for undue grunt labor.

More recently, however, New England ski areas have expanded the scope of what can be considered trail skiing. A few of the old-style squiggles still exist, but the powerful tree-slashing machinery of recent years has literally cleared the way for wider, straighter, more cruisable swaths, cut more flushly to the fall line.

To be honest, I lean toward old times: I remain a fan of the narrow, twisting oldies, even if they are hard to groom, are hard to make snow on, and are ill-suited for skiing in long, aerobic stints. It's stop-and-start skiing in which I must think my way through a run as I ski it, and I like that. But, except for a very few cases of overzealous deforestation by modern trail cutters, I'm not knocking the newer, wider cruisers— they are fun to ski and fun to ski fast, and the fact that their width makes them groomable on a daily (nightly) basis almost assures snow quality of a high order.

That leads to the most significant changes that the 80's brought to New England skiing: Snowmaking and grooming. While ski areas in other parts of the world use manufactured snow mainly to patch up high-traffic spots, New England areas now rely on it as their main skiing surface. Typically, major ski areas in New England have snowmaking on 60 percent or more of their terrain, and several claim more than 90-percent coverage. And New England snowmaking is not just a matter of quantity. What fires forth from the snow-gun artilleries at major New England resorts now is pretty fair match for the real thing. I can say that with some authority, having been deceived more than a few times in recent years into thinking I was skiing natural snow when I wasn't.

Now as a rule I prefer skiing on natural snow, and in general I feel pretty confident in distinguishing real snow from the manufactured stuff. But the weather gods in New England, as elsewhere, aren't always obliging. What the widespread capacity for making snow has enabled New England to do is guarantee quality skiing, regardless of weather, as no other region of the world can.

Making snow, however, is only half the story. The parallel advances in grooming technology have been equally revolutionary. Suffice it to say that the water content and crystal formation of manufactured snow is not the same as natural snow. Manufactured snow must be worked over and fluffed up regularly in order to produce the best possible skiing surface.

I recommend you stop some day after skiing at the snow-maintenance garages at a place like Killington, Okemo, or Sunday River. You're in for a bedazzling array of vehicular technology— fleets of grooming machines that can climb 30-degree slopes and till the snow surface to peach-fuzz smoothness with the precision of an electric razor. Most impressive is what the machines can do in restoring a good skiing surface to a slope that has iced up or been skied off. On a ski trip not long ago, I experienced excellent skiing on a cold day after a two-inch rainfall— something unimaginable a decade ago.

Every skier survey I've seen tells the same story: Long lift lines are the number-one nuisance in skiing. Ski-area operators, of course, have seen those surveys, too, and in the last decade or so have gone after Nuisance Number One with money-letting vengeance. New England areas upgraded lift systems to the point now where an area like Killington can now boast of being able to put more than 30,000 skiers an hour up the mountain. If you crunch a few numbers, you'll discover that most major New England areas have at least twice the hourly lift capacity as the average number of skiers on a busy Saturday. That might not eliminate lift lines entirely, but even at the busiest of times, the 15-minute lift line has become a rarity.

Actually, I think some New England areas have gone overboard trying to meet skiers' demands for shorter lift lines. Resorts that have made recent high-speed installations— Killington, Waterville Valley, Sunday River, for example— have been forced to over-widen trails to accommodate the higher skier volume. And that extra volume, with traveling at varying speeds and varying states of control, can at times be nothing less than scary. I'm willing to wait a few extra minutes in line if it means preserving a bit of old-fashioned, on-slope serenity.

But I know not all skiers agree. On busy weekends at Sugarbush, for example, complaints about the long line at the slow, widely spaced Castle Rock double chair reverberate around the area. Yet the chair's low capacity effectively reduces skier traffic to a trickle on Castle Rock's marvelously intricate and narrow trail network. The integrity of that private, in-the-woods character— part of the essence of New England skiing— remains unviolated. Apparently, a lot of skiers appreciate that; if they didn't, there wouldn't be a line.

New England areas might not have matched Colorado's pace of high-speed lift installation, but I'd rate New England lift-system layouts among the most efficient in the world. With all that can be said for skiing in Europe, it has a major drawback: a lot of time can be spent on lifts that only lead to other lifts, a succession of T-bars and pomas that seem to go nowhere. There's not much of that in New England, where, despite relatively small mountains, lifts rising 2,000 vertical feet or more aren't uncommon. In New England, you ride lifts to ski.

You also ride lifts, in New England as anywhere, to take in the views. Youthful familiarity once made me blase about New England summit views; I figured I was just looking at a bunch of runt mountains and lots of trees. But having traveled in the Rockies, the Alps, the Sierras, and other ranges, I've come back to New England with a clearer perspective, a more discerning eye. Lift-top views in the Rockies and Alps tend to be on a vertical plane— high peaks around you, valleys below you. New England views, by comparison, tend to be more horizontal; at New England ski-area summits, you tend to be above the landscape, rather than surrounded by it, with the world rolling away below you like an ocean of forest and farmland. You might not be 10,000 feet above sea level, but on a clear day you feel as if you're standing on top of the world.

Let's turn for a moment to the matter of tradition; nowhere in America do skiing's roots run deeper than they do in New England. This is where lift-serviced skiing in the U.S. began, with the instillation of a rope tow near Woodstock, Vermont in 1934. Many of the best New England ski areas— Cannon, Mad River Glen, Stowe, Sugarloaf, and Wildcat, to name a few— are saturated in skiing tradition: famous trails, famous skiers, famous events. They readily evoke an era of lace boots, long-thongs, bear-trap bindings, and bamboo poles with 10-inch, leather-strapped baskets.

It is interesting, too, to see the ways in which history bonds with the future, how new traditions rise amidst old ones in New England. New England— Stratton to be specific— is where Jake Burton first tried out a newfangled contraption that would birth the revolution that has redefined skiing: the snowboard. Yes, snowboarding was born in time-honored, tradition-bound New England. The past percolates into the present of New England skiing in a way I find wholly satisfying.

Of course, long before skiing established its own tradition, New England could claim plenty of tradition in general. New England today nestles into the national consciousness as a metaphor bordering on clichi— a symbol of old-fashioned values and time-tested ways, of things fundamentally, traditionally, American.

Sure, a lot of New England tradition has disappeared. It has been encroached upon or smothered by change and development, or been commercially reconstituted for the sake of tourism. But you still come across many New Englanders who pride themselves mightily and genuinely in going about their business as generations have before them. Resistance to change burrowed itself long ago into New England's soul, which is probably why you can still find New England ski areas in religious defiance of change. Mad River Glen, for example, continues to run its 45-year-old single chair as its main lift.

This is not to say that New England ski areas have barred the door to modern development and amenities. Far from it at places like Killington, Stratton, and Sunday River, which evolved rapidly through the 80's as full-service resorts. But the development, by and large, hasn't spread much further than the ski-area basins. Most of those postcard New England towns— with notable exceptions like North Conway, New Hampshire— have remained largely unaffected.

In short, you can still find old-country authenticity if you want it. And if you want modern, slopeside convenience or nightlife, you can find those things, too. New England has a little bit of everything.

Avoiding The Pitfalls!

A little bit of everything includes some negatives, but these can be avoided— at least minimized— if you prepare for them.

New England's most notorious negative is cold: New England winters might not be colder than winters in the west or Europe, but the dampness of the air at lower elevations makes them seem so. Winters don't seem to me to be getting much warmer, despite all that's said about global warming. What has changed is skiwear, which now gives New England skiers a fighting chance against the cold. I consider my most valuable gear for New England skiing to be a good, top-to-bottom long-underwear outfit, well-insulated mittens, and warm socks. I always bring several clothing layers, since layering allows me to adapt to varying temperatures, and I prize maximum insulation from minimum bulk. If I'm bulky, I can't move, and if I can't move, I can't stay warm.

Snowmaking might have enabled New England ski areas to guarantee quality skiing, but it hasn't done away with the obvious fact that New England receives a relatively small amount of natural snow. I say"relatively" because although the annual snowfall averages of the areas— ranging from 150 to 280 inches— might be substantial, they fall well short of the 300- to 500-inch averages reported in Utah and Colorado. You do come across powder days in New England, but variable snow conditions are obviously more the norm. Ice, powder, wind-packed crud, groomed corduroy: I've often encountered all of them in a single run. And I won't leave out roots, rocks, stumps, and other "unmarked obstacles" (as ski areas like calling them) despite the fact that many areas have invested considerable summer time and money to ridding their slopes of that stuff. New England's mountains can still be like some of the old-timers that live among them: gnarled, sinewy, and unyielding.

Now, variation of snow conditions happens to be something I like about New England, although I know that many skiers don't share my sentiments. It demands good balance and good turning fundamentals; skiing variable snow well means skiing at your technical best. Whether you like that sort of skiing or you don't, however, you're in for hard times without a well-tuned pair of skis. Skiers in the West have told me they've gone a whole season without tuning their skis. Eastern skiing won't let you get away with that. So keep your edges in shape— even if it's just a two-minute matter of a nightly emery cloth rub-down to remove burrs.

One final negative— not unique to New England, of course— is price. Grooming, snowmaking, and better lifts may have done wonders to improve the skiing, but along with inflation, insurance, general development, etc. they've wreaked havoc on lift-ticket prices. $40 daily lift tickets are a reality.

Full daily ticket prices, however, are somewhat like full-coach airline fares: If you plan ahead, you can find substantial discounts. Bargains and packages abound, especially in January, when business tends to be slow. I can't tell you which deals are best, since packages and discounts are constantly being restructured. All I can recommend is that you call for package information from ski areas before booking your vacation. Savings can be substantial. Ski-club membership or discount ski cards are other avenues to explore to keep this painfully expensive sport from bursting your budget.

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