The Holiday Valley Blog

In Western New York, I earn my miles. Between work during the week and recreation on the weekends, a lot of life happens on rural roads. My car has been incredibly reliable, carrying me to countless trailheads and ski areas over the years. On the way to Holiday Valley, I hit a milestone as the odometer rolled over to 333,333 miles. Triple threes, on a ski day, headed into the hills? That felt like a good omen.

For the second year in a row, Holiday Valley was the first resort to open in WNY, thanks again to heavy lake-effect snow. Last year, a storm dropped roughly 40 inches before opening day. This season, they’d already been open for a week with snowfall totals topping 50 inches.

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Like the rest of the northeast, we’ve been patiently waiting for winter to arrive here in Western New York. We received our typical early season dump that puts a foot on the ground only to take it away a week or so later. Then we had a slow start with limited snow-making windows.

There have been moments where we thought it was on, a few small storms with a couple inches here and there. There was also the recent storm that dropped 20” in the Buffalo metro area but left the ski areas to the south high and dry. We were all waiting for the weather to send some classic WNY lake effect to the hills.

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