Pico (VT) 2/28
What a great day to ski this little hidden gem of a mountain. This place really suffers when the conditions aren’t great, but when they’re as sublime as this, Pico really is the place to be. Classic New England thin-cut trails where each one has its own personality. Also, who could forget about the Summit Chair which has some of the last remaining Yan teardrop chairs in the country? My buddy and I both made sure to ski the famous Poma line in all its steep, narrow glory.
Loon (NH) 3/3
My first time to this place. My friend and I jokingly ended up labeling it New Hampshire Okemo due to its similarities in layout and development. As for the actual skiing, they ski nothing like each other. I enjoyed Loon. It’s nothing too out of the ordinary, but it’s charming in its own right. They’ve got a neat bi-directional chair lift and a tiny old four-person gondola. They also now have the Kancamagus 8, an ultra-wide, eight person heated chair lift …
read morePico (VT) 2/28
What a great day to ski this little hidden gem of a mountain. This place really suffers when the conditions aren’t great, but when they’re as sublime as this, Pico really is the place to be. Classic New England thin-cut trails where each one has its own personality. Also, who could forget about the Summit Chair which has some of the last remaining Yan teardrop chairs in the country? My buddy and I both made sure to ski the famous Poma line in all its steep, narrow glory.
Loon (NH) 3/3
My first time to this place. My friend and I jokingly ended up labeling it New Hampshire Okemo due to its similarities in layout and development. As for the actual skiing, they ski nothing like each other. I enjoyed Loon. It’s nothing too out of the ordinary, but it’s charming in its own right. They’ve got a neat bi-directional chair lift and a tiny old four-person gondola. They also now have the Kancamagus 8, an ultra-wide, eight person heated chair lift servicing a secondary trail pod that feels just a little underwhelming.
Wildcat (NH) 3/4
My first time here as well, and it was amazing. I knew of Wildcat before coming here, and I knew how it was located in the Presidentials, but I didn’t know just how vertically-oriented and beautiful this place was until I skied it for myself. I had one of, if not the best days of my season here on this day. The Wildcat Express is the main summit chair here. It serves 2,000’ of vertical in just about 6 minutes. I skied 25 runs here even with a couple of breaks and got 51,000’ of vertical. I now understood why my friend I was skiing with thinks so highly of this place.
Sunday River (ME) 3/5
Thursday River, that’s where I skied on this day. I love this mountain. I call it Maine Killington in jest, but in reality, I’d take this mountain over Killington any (Sun)day. Killington may be The Beast of the East, but Sunday River is my Maine mountain :P . Though it was noticeably getting later in the season by this point, this was still a great day. Some rocks were jumped off of, and some tire swings were sat in. It was a day well-spent at Sunday River.
Wachusett Mountain (MA) 3/6
The weirdest day of the season was had here, no doubt, and I have no plans to return to this authoritarian police-state of a mountain. In all seriousness, I did have fun skiing this mountain, and I’m sure it’s the best eastern Mass. has to offer, but the vibes here are really off. None of the three chairs leaving the base area were spinning until noon due to de-icing. My group of friends and I decided to stop waiting around and climb up Mt. Wachusett ourselves. We made a quick stop at the quarter-mountain lodge for some apple cider doughnuts. We then climbed up to the observation tower at the true summit to take some pictures. Of course, right after doing so, the chairs started spinning for the day. But back to my other point, the vibes are just off at this place. There’s a thin veil of pretentiousness hanging over this mountain. You can buy sushi at the ski lodge. You need a special pass to use the terrain park. The people (read: Bostoners) were generally rude or stank of marijuana. The ski patrol here would take pride in pulling a child over for having too much fun. There are also mountain rangers here who are basically ski patrollers who spent money on the game in order to LARP being a more important authority figure. The one saving grace was that the lodge cafeteria here carried Squirt grapefruit soda.
Yawgoo Valley (RI) 3/7
Despite the previous day’s fall from grace, we could indeed stoop lower. OK, I’ll try not to hate on this hill too hard, but with only 245’ of vertical, it’s hard not to. I collect trail maps, and when I went to claim one from this place, the attendant handed me a piece of printer paper. Whatever, at least Rhode Island has a ski area for itself. Oh, but don’t worry about the fact that this place drove all the other ski areas in the state out of business with their fancy double chair lifts. I skied down the black diamond trail TNT here backwards. Make of that what you will…
Pico -> Killington (VT) 3/8 [BONUS]
And now that I had skied every state in the region, with one more day off to spare, I decided to go back to good old Vermont for an early-late-season Killington day. But this wasn’t just any Killington day: it was a Killington-Pico interconnect day. My buddy and I parked at Pico in the morning and took a couple of depressing gray icy granular laps off the Summit Chair before skiing down across the Long Trail and popping out onto the Killington-Pico interconnect trail, which was surprisingly well groomed. Skiing this for my first time was quite fun, and while I wish I could have gotten to see the views on a bluebird day, it was still a fun experience waving hello to all of the cross-countryers as we made our way over to Killington. Skiing at K-Mart was a whole lot better this day than at Pico. We asked if we could hitch a ride up the old Snowdon Poma now located at Ramshead, but sadly, there was racing going on that day (classic race-ism yet again). Instead, we took the quad up and had a great day chasing the sun around the mountain. At the end of the day, taking the bus back from Snowshed base to Pico was easy enough, and it didn’t take too long to get through all of the stops.
And Thus Concludes the Adventure
Special thanks to all of my ski buddies out there. Whether or not any of you will ever see this, I’m unsure, but still, thanks for keeping me company out on the slopes.
read less
