Icecoast

Honestly, their snowmaking improvement is impressive, the snow under the new guns is fantastic. Just the layout of the mountain sucks, the lifts suck, the clientele sucks. I can’t complaint for 270 bucks though, having the mountain open for an hour for season pass holders only each weekend for first tracks is nice.

And that’s why I’m thinking next year I’m going with a montage pass, unless something wild happens with these elk rumors. Sure they don’t have a high speed lift but they have good vert, good snowmaking, and easy to get to. I screwed up and got a mountain creek pass this season. Never again.

I would go a step ahead and say that Vail has negatively impacted PA skiing as a whole. If you’re in the DC area or southern/central PA your options are Vail. If your out by Pittsburg, your options are vail (including the Ohio areas). I believe in competition in business, but what vail has done in PA should not have been allowed. They own so many ski areas in one state (8 to be exact) with those areas properly positioned to all but force people to buy an epic pass unless they want to go to blue knob or Boyce park, that all they have to do is the bare minimum to exist. That does not spur competition when all you have to do to be better than them is 1% more. I mean, what are you going to do if you live in central PA and don’t want to ski vail? Hoof it for hours to get to the poconos? Hope that blue knob hasn’t blown their miniscule snowmaking budget on that sweet Altoona meth? I think the poconos have it slightly better than the rest of the state as you can go to blue, camelback, or Shawnee which other than camelback the rest seem to have stepped up their operations a bit as they have to compete with each other.

Wildcat apparently still only has one route open down the mountain. It’s unbelievable, especially since it’s been cold for almost an entire month.

I went to whitetail the year before it was sold to vail (RIP peaks). It was cold for weeks leading up to my visit and with peak resorts snowmaking efforts, conditions were some of the best I’ve ridden in PA. That being said, I’ve heard rumors that vail does not use snowmax in their water like peaks did, so they make a wetter denser product now. Not sure if true or not, but having ridden hunter pre and post vail, I can say the snow is definitely worse under vail. The mountain layout is really genius. The trail map makes it look kind of boring, but even though the trails are straight down the fall line, there is some really fun character to them. The blues are steeper than most blues elsewhere, which is really fun. I really enjoyed my day there. the only downside I can see is if anyone your going with is a park rider. Like what vail did to boulder, they did to whitetail. They removed the park lift, and moved the park over to this super tiny side trail with room for like 2 features. This move isn’t shown on their map yet, but its happened. I posted a trip report from back then

According to alpine zone, Gregg Confer is the manager at elk. And according to Gregg confer, elk is for sale (as of June 10th).

https://www.media.pa.gov/pages/DCNR_details.aspx?newsid=1039 potential "new" touring area in PA. 2500 acres, with logging roads, 1300 vertical foot pipeline cut, and some old ski trails. I did read one article that mentioned opening it up to skiing, biking, and hiking. I would be neat if they allowed some glade clearing like some of the touring associations do in new england.

I did the same. I bough a mountain creek pass, which is nice and was thinking about doing indy too.

With this new modern lift ticket situation, do you still need to park and get into that cattle truck? or is their a kiosk at the lift next to the lot you can redeem at?

Sheeeit, even a modern quad with carpet loading would improve the place drastically. If I owned a ski area and was thinking of selling, I would probably use used parts to get the lift up and running just to make it until the sale is completed.

They seem to doing well. They plan on bringing some old trails back to life, and add another lift to vernon peak. they are making a 5 million dollar investment into automated snowmaking this season as well. In terms of shorter season, it depends on the year. for 19/20, blue and creek opened on the same date, and closed on the same date due to covid shutdowns, and in 20/21 blue opened 5 days earlier and closed a day earlier. But there are some years where blue opens almost a month before hand. Weather is weird.

That's a hell of a price. Hunter sold to Peak Resorts for 36 million in 2015. If that's true I would have to guess there's a bunch of land that came with it.

Just an FYI if anyone is looking for a cheap pass. They allow uphill and open an hour early for passholders on weekends. not a bad deal at all.

This is true. I wonder what the plans for blue will be another version of camelback or if blue remains the "ski area" of the two. The guy did say they have 42 lanes of tubing. That must print money faster than the Fed.