West Mountain: Wing It and Ring It

If you’re a New York skier, I don’t need to tell you that winter has been uninspiring so far. In spite of the valiant efforts of snowmakers across the northeast, there is a pitifully small amount of terrain open for us to slide on. We have been reminded once again that weather is destiny for skiers.

West Mountain Welcome Bear
The West Mountain Welcome Bear

To make matters worse, I don’t have a ton of flexibility, schedule wise. Most of the time I can only do day trips and I need to fit them in whenever I have the time to go.

By the end of December I was getting desperate. When a window opened for me and both my boys to go skiing on the last day of the year, there was no question that we would take advantage of it. I researched our Indy Pass options.

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Mohawk: The Indy Tour Resumes

A couple years ago, I wrote something called “In Defense of Early Season.” The premise was that even though early season conditions aren’t perfect, skiing is better than not skiing. That concept was front of mind last weekend. It had been too long since I’d skied; I just had to get out.

Mohawk Mountain sunrise

I also wrote about “Skiing in the Rain” in the past but I wasn’t eager to do it again, so we settled on Sunday over Saturday. The warm, wet weather this month has stymied the early season plans of many local mountains. Greek Peak and Mohawk Mountain are both on the Indy Pass and open, so they were options. It didn’t make much difference, considering they would both feature limited terrain.

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TGR Stoke the Fire

Ski movie tours are a long-standing tradition, going all the way back, almost to the very beginning of downhill skiing in the United States. Names like Miller and Barrymore pioneered the art form in the days when ski movies were narrated by a guy standing at the back of the theater, often the same guy who edited the film with tape and a pair of scissors. For many people, attending the annual ski movie premiere in person still marks the unofficial start of the ski season.

East 32nd St in NYC

I’ve been to a few tour stops but this year I wanted to change things up. I’d never been to a Teton Gravity Research movie so that was my first stop when researching options. I’ve been a fan of their movies for awhile but always just ordered the DVDs (when that was a thing) or streamed them.

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