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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Rich Edwards of Catamount

Catamount logoRich Edwards is an unassuming guy who grew up among New York skiing royalty. His father Don Edwards and his business partners were intimately involved in the original development of skiing at Silvermine, Fahnestock, Sterling Forest and they took over Catamount in 1974.

After owning Catamount for 45 years, the mountain was sold to the owners of Berkshire East. Rich is still part of the Catamount team today.

Rich has a deep well of NY ski knowledge, and we tried to tap into it, in a relatively short interview.

— Harvey

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