It took me a minute the other night to think of my roommate's name, but it was Rory. She wasn't actually my roommate, but she was dating Jason the bartender and he was my roommate, and somehow they fit on that tiny little Mt Baker Employee Lodge mattress. The things we do for love, I guess. Or short term ski area romance. Anyway, Rory and I were having a chat about racing gates, specifically the citizens' Super G we'd just run that day. Raven's Edge, I think the Howats called it. I mentioned in passing that I didn't understand how I made up time on the second run, because I'd felt so much more in control throughout the first run. Having never run gates before, I had no idea what it should feel like. Rory just laughed, and said you know you're going fast if you're uncomfortable and maybe a little outa control. Today that just sounds like race coach gibberish, but it was super profound to me then.
Recently, our local hill was voted "Best Ski Resort - Readers' Choice" by the well-known ski magazine, Newsweek. As we all know, Newsweek has correspondents in all the major ski markets, like Äre, Innsbruck, St Moritz, the Vail Valley, Burlington, Cham, Santiago, Hokkaido, Scotland, the Eastern Townships/Memphremagog, Santa Fe, Cuyahoga, and the like.
Sorry. I can't keep a straight face. I honestly forgot that Newsweek existed.
At any rate, Best Ski Resort. I won't dig into the list very far, other than to say that one of these things is not like the others. They rate highly some familiar faces, like Telluride, Sun Valley, and Deer Valley. Y'know, resorts. Places with amenities like lodging, after-ski activities, and, I don't know, Maserati dealerships with complimentary Courvoisier served in Swarovski crystal with a side of blow. Bogus just seems, well, bogus in comparison. (If this setup sounds familiar, hear me out. Ima do something different, hopefully.) Without question, however, the only other joint on their list that's also on our list is Whiteface. Fur might be commonplace in the town of Park City or the ersatz, ridiculously named, and utterly pointless Town of Mountain Village inside a corner the Telluride Ski Resort. It stands out like a fur coat in a mud parking lot in the parking lot mud next to Chair 5, though. And we try to park in the really muddy lots.
The rangeland along the upper Arkansas south of Bueny is like a lot of the West. Fairly arid, scrubby conifer and sage and aspen, which you can tell because of the way that it is. Sheep country, if there ever was. It's gentrified over the years, slowly at first, more rapid now as everywhere. Salida has definitely arrived. In the snow of a cold December day, though, it is a quiet winter scene of the sort we all dream about. You can't see the accumulation deepen, but when you get to Monarch, there's six or eight and the Christmas Trees are holding better turns than you might expect. The parking lot is half full, a lot of Texas plates this close to Christmas. The bar is full, Texas drawls and cowboy boots and beers that don't cost a fortune. It's cold on the hill, windy, inconsistent as the Rockies always are.
Monarch has five chairs, with plans and okay for a sixth. Runs the new lift will serve are already cut, and the new Skytrac triple is slated for completion this fall. If you're not a nerd like me, you might not know that there was really no other option for who they went with on the new chair. Skytrac's only drive terminal is the Monarch, named after King George III the ski area who bought Skytrac's first-ever drive terminal. Skytrac is now owned by HTI/Leitner-Poma, but the cats who founded the company were former CTEC engineers. Probably not coincidentally, the last full lift built at Monarch is a Garaventa-CTEC, and the other four are Halls, which, through a few M&A manœuvres, is owned by Dopplemayr/Garaventa. The unsexiness of all this business speak aside, Monarch is in my book the best ski area in Colorado. (And as we all know. . .) There are arguments to be made, of course, even for Alterra-owned A-Basin and Powdr-owned Copper, but I just don't care. Monarch is not where you go to be seen, it's where you go to ski. And that, good people, is the entire essence.
I've been to Burlington, WA, and the Burlington Coat Factory in the SuperMall Outlet Collection Seattle (actually Auburn), but never to Burlington VT. As such, all I can do is dream. Not necessarily about Burlington itself, but all of those towering ~ 4,000' peaks that frame the skyline. (Did I actually say "towering"? Oof.) There's Mansfield, of course, and Jay, but I'm not really interested in water parks or trams or in paying Vail for the priviledge of accessing the state highpoint. I want the ragged rawness of Madonna and Sterling, at Smuggs. The family-owned and -run Bolton, or the hopefully-not-too-too-bougie charm of Mont Sutton, just over the line in les Cantons de l'Est. (Which is what you call the most English part of French Cannuckistan so that you can ignore names like Glen Sutton and Dunham.) The Eastern Townships look like what a French prøtègé of Norman Rockwell would paint. Snow, stout thickets of mysterious trees, gorgeous hills the locals call mountains, snow, cafés, brioche, thick wine from the old country, and probly a poutine or two.
This part of the world is by no means unknown, with Stowe just sitting there like a jewel waiting to be stolen, and Jay up there by itself, smug like a narco who actually got out of the game alive, water park and fraud convictions notwithstanding. Burke in its corner, the forgotten cousin. It's not the glamour, or the Boston accents off to do some weekend warrin', that I want. It's the still-remaining mystery. The certainty that it'll snow, even if it's not until next year. And yes, the rain. I swear, I'd learn how to ski in the rain again if I were there.
If we're parsing bests, and we are, we cannot ignore New England. There's just so much history, so many little hills and big, so much life. Little towns tucked into the draws and hollers, amazing views on the days where the sky turns blue and the trees stay white. Names, gosh, they just roll off the tongue. Smugglers' Notch. Saskadena. Sugarloaf. Whaleback. Saddleback. Owl's Head. Mont Bechervaise. (Frantically checking if it's named after a cheese. So far, no go.) Bromont. Catamount. Yawgoo Valley. Moon Valley, although that is now Titus. Which makes me sad. Big Rock. Le Massif de Charlevoix, better know simply as Le Massif. Mad River Glen. Mont Tremblant. Loon, Cannon, Wildcat, Plattekill. Maybe none of them are Hash Tag The Best Skiing In North America Tee Em, but maybe, when the Nor'Easter sets up just right, one of em can be for a week or two. If you've skied the Platty trees with a Laszlo or Brownski in a classic dump, well, hats off. Supposedly it does get better. I got not clue just how.
People ask me from time to time about my favourites, and I always demur. Choosing is hard, even if it's options for gloves or goggles or helmet liners. When it comes to where one should ski, it's so personal as to render recommendations null and void or at least more of an impressionist sketch than a real, hard and fast guide. The truth is, even if the only option is Vail, one should ski. In sickness and in health. If there are options, try em out. The drive to Soldier isn't half-bad, easier for sure than to McCall, but folks here always go to Brundage or Tam and leave Fairfield to the sad losers who don't know better. Like me and Amy. Folks here are wrong about a lot of things, not the least of which is Soldier Mountain.
It's quiet in the loudest of times, and gets less snow than Bogus or Tam. It hasn't trademarked the useless and untrue marketing phrase "The Best Snow in Idaho" like Brundage has. There are only two chairs. The lodge is small, and the parking lot unpaved. There was a fire here not that long ago, and it wasn't started by the ski area. (IYKYK.) They lost a bridge and almost lost the lower lift and the lodge. Locals, as always, showed up and saved the structures. The newly-open pitches are nice, even if the small stands of Doug fir that used to, um, stand here made for some interesting turns. Soldier has what so many small family joints have, what so many corporate joints with their fancy chondotrams and gondobriolifts and giant blue bubbles and television screens don't. Space to take a breath and clean air to actually breathe. Belonging, or at least the room to believe you might could. Small rollovers, unfamiliar trees, and some old folks from somewhere else who ski every sunny day because that's what they've done since 1949. T-shirts with a snowcat or ski area logo for sale next to the always decent pot o' chili. Good grooming, too, once the grass is covered. They're open three or four days a week, and the local kids all yell at each other from the chair and cheer each other on. (I'm sure there's some cliquishness here, like anywhere, but I'm painting an idyll at the moment. Let me have my dreams.)
Mt Baker has the snow, and the terrain, and the absolutely stunning views, and on the face of it in the right crowd, you could easily call them the best. They have that new mid-mountain chalet, which is gorgeous, and Don Wilcox's fever dream at White Salmon, the main lodge. Hash tag World record snowfall. Legendary baked salmon. And, unfortunately, the attitude to go along with it all. A mean undercurrent from which you're never fully safe. One of the rudest, most condescending coworkers I've ever had is one of the top muckety-mucks, and in his on-hill reports he sounds exactly the same as he did in the fall of 2000. Baker is the personification of the common human misperception that because the place you are is legit, by extension, you are as well. You could die inbounds at Baker, fairly easily, and folks have. Baker's been shut down at least once by their liability carrier for exactly that reason. Many folks then take this knowledge and run with it, believing that since they're alive, they've bested some demon that weaker folks can't.
Folks pass through, good folks, like Rory and Jason the Bartender. People who stick, though, with few exceptions, are mossbacks, meaner than hell and hiding from something or other. That fake-chill pseudo-hippie bullshit where you're always wondering when the hammer's goin down. When the trustafarian in full Arc'teryx kit is gonna unleash a tirade on you for not smacking the icy chair seat with enough angst and wore out sheave liner. When Howat's gonna just sell you down the river.
To call something the best is hubris. Unnecessary. There are no objective measures that matter. Snowfall? Okay, Baker wins. Unless Alyeska does. Or Alta. Japow. Erie, PA. Or Bogus, if you can believe it. Not season or monthly totals, but just last month we got more out of a two-day cycle than anyone else in North America in that same two-day stretch. It's not just politicians and free-marketeers who bend the data to serve their own ends. As well, too, also, do we only honour the amount of SWE that falls? That sticks around? Or do we start getting snobby and try to quantify what is "best"? I disagree with Ski Utah, and even with Professor PowPow himself, Jim Steenburgh. Utah is not the greatest snow on earth, just as Big Sky isn't the Biggest Skiing in the US, let alone North America. (Although, they seem to have backed off that particular marketing angle.) The quality of a turn, how it feels in the moment, is so heavily personal, and effected so aggressively by mood, and ability, and timing, and add in your own metrics, that measuring it is as impossible as it is unnecessary. (Thanks, Stacie. I'll never misspell that word.)
Is Bogus the best precisely because of that ephemeral, unknowable thing? Some unknowable that we don't have any idea what it even is? Or is it because some random in town built a bot to stuff the ballot box? Does it even matter? To that last point, I'd say no. It does not.
I can't remember exactly which turnout I waited so long at, but it was one or two or three below Cayuse, on the north side. 410 is a winding tunnel of a mountain road in the Park, always wet. Maybe not under that one heat dome, the one that burnt Lytton, BC and set records I pray to God will stand for millennia, but otherwise, wet. It's gorgeous, and the air is clean even with the higher burden of motor tourism this modern era hath wrought. That day, I don't even remember which summer, was quiet, to the point where I probly shoulda maybe not planned a long descent that ended with a mandatory hitch or two-hour skin. Who are we, though, if we always follow what is "best"?
I started the day up at Chinook, mostly skiing the east face, looking down the upper American River drainage. After a few fun-but-perfunctory runs, I figured what the heck?! I'd been considering a long tour, long for me anyway, for quite a while. Top of Yakima to wherever I landed down on 410. I started by booting up the north chute to the peak itself. Steep, almost a crux at the top. The turns in the chute were smooth and creamy June corn. Every turn that day was.
Upon exiting the chute, I traversed left under the cornices that hang menacingly off the the north side of the west shoulder of Yakima, and when I saw the longest descent on the pitch to my right, dropped my right knee and skied to a small bench where some older folks on AT gear were collected, looking up at the ridgeline. One of them asked if I'd heard it behind me. "Heard what?" He pointed with his pole, looking a bit shaken. I turned around to look, hoping to see my sweet turns, only to see them covered by a slide. Part of the cornice had gone, maybe two fridges wide. (I grew up at Crystal, and at least then, some lines off the King were named by the size of common debris slides. Hence, Appliances, Toaster, et cetera.) The rubble crumbled as it went, but I'm betting it woulda broke a leg or two, or worse. I raised my eyebrows, shrugged, and headed off the bench toward the upper end of Klickitat Creek. From there, it's tree skiing to the road.
It took almost two hours waiting, but finally a gray sedan pulled up. There were four Mexican dudes out on a drive, super friendly, really interested in what I was doing. They didn't speak much English, and I even less Spanish, but we got the point through gestures and laughs. They gave me a ride up to Chinook, one of the fellas even taking off his shoe and using the whole thing to tie the trunk down over my skis. Up top, we took some pictures, and they tried to ski on my tele boards. There aren't any real easy pitches on the east side of the pass, and they all fell a bunch, but they were clearly enjoying themselves. I was as well. We hung out for a while before I realised how late it was getting, and I headed off to town.
The turns were solid that day, but with repetition and exposure, not actually remarkable in the arc of my skiing life. I am privileged when I say that, I know. I can't measure anything about those turns, even in memory. They are long gone, the snow melted two decades ago along with my recollection of any individual motion. Thing is, though, much like Bogus last month, I have no doubt that for that short time, those turns were the best in the country.
