The Backwardest Mountain is The Best. It is some of the most challenging skiing on the East Coast, with steep gnarly pitches over rocks and through trees covered in the best moguls (thanks to their no-snowboard policy) all serviced by a double and a single chair. While every mountain around it is owned by a ski resort mega-corporation, Mad River is cooperatively owned. It is an amazing ski experience. Eastern skiing definitely means contending with ice and trees and other natural objects impeding your progress, which makes it a very technical exercise, but also makes it more exciting and MRG’s terrain, ungroomed and covered strictly with natural snow, is the perfect showcase for this type of challenge. The ultimate throwback, it makes me nostalgic for a period before I was born…
That was Saturday. Sunday was spent at Mad River’s “younger sister”, Sugarbush, which exemplifies state-of-the-art resort technology. Of course, the lodge is amazing and chairs whisk you up the hill rapidly, maximizing downhill time, but something is lost in that evolution. Regardless, I managed to have one of my best Sugarbush days ever, discovering some great woods that I had never found before. This is one recent development in skiing that I have been very impressed with: resorts’ willingness to open up their woods and allow skiers to take their own risks. Terrain parks have also been an example of increasing risk of bodily harm at skier’s discretion. It is a dangerous sport (which is why I just purchased my first helmet) and people are injured and even DIE recreating this way but, and perhaps it is for precisely that reason, it is my absolute favorite day-long activity and I enjoy doing it on any mountain.
Narda and I were in Deer Valley a few weeks ago. Somebody said that Alta was the best mountain in the US. I agreed that it was on an annual basis but that every 5 years a small mountain in Vermont called Mad River gets dumped on and when it does it is the best mountain in the world.
…in the world!
Enjoy it.
Schmid! I have a very specific memory of getting shut out of a trip to MRG with your family because an epic storm made travel impossible and amending their tagline to “ski it if you can get there!”