Mondays are for dreaming: Mad River Glen

I’m going to start this post right away acknowledging that it may seem like I’m cheating a little. Mad River Glen is a ski area in Waitsfield, Vermont where I will be in two days. In fact, it’s a ten-minute drive from the Millbrook Inn (owned by my parents) where I will be staying for Thanksgiving. I’ll all but be able to see it out my window all next week. But in a way that it is harder, because it will be so close and yet so far.

You see, we haven’t yet gotten our kids on skis. And in fact, flatlander Matt has only downhill skied once in his life. Me? I was a skier in another life. That is before graduate school, marriage, and kids took me away from New England. In fact I learned to ski at Mad River, which is a bit like a badge of honor since it may be the most difficult place in the U.S. to learn to ski. The pitch of the ramp off the chairlift on the practice slope alone is daunting, so say nothing of the policy of leaving anything ungroomed that doesn’t really need grooming (because of, say, glare ice). There are moguls everywhere and no one really cares all that much if you have fancy equipment unless you can use it well. To paraphrase Sinatra: if you can ski there, you can ski anywhere.

To say I was not an athlete while I was growing up is an understatement. But I loved being outdoors and once I learned to ski I discovered I loved it as well. All my winter vacations were spent skiing at Mad River and I actually got good enough at it to attempt even the daunting Paradise (see photo below), which is now officially a trail, but wasn’t during my childhood. Probably because the entire top half is usually an ice cliff. How cool I felt to slip off to the side at the top of the single chair, knowing that I was skiing something too hard to even be called a trail. So what if my knees and my chin met repeatedly on the way down – I made it intact, and even picked up some speed at the end.

What else does Mad River have to recommend it?

• They don’t make snow. They also don’t allow snowboarding, which to me is a plus (although I know that many other people do not share this sentiment).
• The terrain is amazing and you can ski in the trees.



• Nothing about it is fast except the skiers. By way of example I cite the single chair, which is nearly 60 years old and can be a place for quiet reflection or for catcalling the people skiing the bumps on The Chute underneath.
• It’s all about skiing as it once was. No fancy clothes (a status symbol there is to wear clothing that sports duct tape), no working on your skier’s tan, no spa. This is about you and the mountain. And there are still deals to be found here, especially midweek.
• It is cooperatively owned by people who loved it enough that when its future was in jeopardy they banded together to purchase it and keep it intact and pristine.
• And for families: they have phenomenal instructors, all of whom are world-class skiers, all kinds of kids’ programs, and an awesome daycare called the Cricket Club. That is if your child can be kept off the mountain.

If you had asked me when I was twenty, I would have said that of course any children of mine would be skiers from a young age and of course they would be Mad River skiers. But somehow 40 forgot what 20 thought. We live far away from Vermont and our schedules have not so far permitted any visits between November and July. And then of course there’s the expense, and the equipment…But when I think of my boys zipping down Upper Antelope on a perfect day, the snow thick on the pine trees, the sky deep and blue, well, I think I need to get my act together. Really. There are people who move to Waitsfield with no viable way to make a living just to make sure that their kids can ski as soon as they can walk. Time for me to at least show up.

I just checked and they are going to try and open Thanksgiving weekend. Would it be worth it to get one day of skiing in, or will it just insure that I’m dreaming for months to come? We’ll see.

Photos of Mad River courtesy of Alan Cordova.