The Ski Life Blog

I started alpine skiing in 1999 at age 40 and early on I wanted to be an expert. I wasn’t sure what defined an expert other than a vague idea about being able to “ski anything.” What is an expert skier?

I recently skied with my six-year-old for the first time on a black rated trail. Gore’s Sagamore is essentially a long blue trail with two black pitches. Skiing it doesn’t make my daughter an expert. She’s an advanced beginner who skied expert terrain. Expert status is about how you get down not what you get down.

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Over the past week, many skiers were excited to see video, images, and trip reports of skin tracks and powder from the forests of West Virginia. I saw them, and they were awesome for any time of year, let alone late October.

That joy we enjoyed on the backside stood in sharp contrast to the awful side of the storm that our neighbors faced at the front.

And now, the news cycle is turning the page to other stories about blue and red states. As the mainstream media and public suffer from disaster fatigue, the story of Sandy will inevitably be swept aside. In the process there are devastated communities that will also be brushed from our consciousness.

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Each fall when SKI Magazine publishes their annual reader survey of eastern ski resorts, we hear a lot of griping about the results. This year one of our contributors, Coach Z, decided to set up a similar poll and put it out for NY Ski Blog readers.

Coach used the same mountains as the SKI survey, except that he added, admittedly arbitrarily, Gore Mountain to the mix. The survey was posted in our Forums and ran from Oct 20 to Oct 31, 2012.

A note on methodology: we don’t claim that our survey was scientific or all-inclusive. It was done somewhat “on a lark” and the volume of response surprised us.  It is now our intent to do this survey annually. We’ll work to make it our own and improve its value next year.

Respondents were primarily from New York and New Jersey:

• 25% live North of Glens Falls or in the North Country
• 33% live Upstate from Glens falls down through the Hudson Valley
• The remainder, over 40%, are flatlanders

They ski in New York:

• 40% called Gore Mountain their home mountain
• 20% are Whiteface passholders
• 15% are Catskill regulars (Plattekill, Belleyare, Hunter)
• 15% were free agents, not tied to a ski area

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