Elk Mountain PA for sale?

The have planted like 10k Norway spruce. It makes the place look great and reminds me of more northern areas. The Norway Spruce line the trails to create a fence to keep people out of the trees. They claim the trees help preserve snow and snowmaking. I still get a yearly brochure in the mail from Elk and the planting of more trees is always included in the 'new' uprgrade section.
They were planted most likely for snow retention. Those trees block the angled sunlight really well.
 
Snow making is been outstanding for years, hopefully it stays the same. Early and late season they will have the best conditions around other then Bell maybe. They are my go to when thing’s get thin at Greek.
 
The lifts at Elk are old but I get the impression that they are generally well maintained. They are all fixed grips but run relatively fast for what they are and I never experience many stops.The resort itself appears to be well maintained. They do a good job with snowmaking and the grooming is always rated as some of the best. I think the trails are the best in PA and I've skied Blue Knob several times. They do have a prohibition against tree skiing. They could have some good glades if there was enough snow. I think more people would ski there if they added two fixed grip quads and added some glades.
 
The have planted like 10k Norway spruce. It makes the place look great and reminds me of more northern areas. The Norway Spruce line the trails to create a fence to keep people out of the trees. They claim the trees help preserve snow and snowmaking. I still get a yearly brochure in the mail from Elk and the planting of more trees is always included in the 'new' uprgrade section.
Did there used to be native trees in the areas where the Norway Spruce were planted. Second or third growth?

Having dense trees between trails can help preserve snow when it's windy during and/or after a snowstorm. Whether or not tree skiing is encouraged doesn't really make that much difference though. Timberline in WV has plenty of trees. Some areas are pretty dense. But when there is enough snow, tree skiing is fine. A few more obvious areas had work down at some point to thin the trees out a bit.

One of the reasons I stopped by Elk about ten years ago was the monthly 1-day Women's Ski Clinic. Don't think that's happened for quite a while though. It was popular with locals.
 
I’ve skied Elk off and on for the past 40 years plus , as far as the trees go I can speculate that they were added as natural snow fences. Prior to the trees the wind would scour the peak .
The downside now is some pose a lift hazard , but they do shade some trails and I’m sure they do preserve some snow. Kinda cool with 45’ trees next to the lift.

The snow is consistently better than the Poconos . I’ve had some early lake effect powder days. It’s really frustrating looking at all that powder in the woods and being off limits due to their “No woods” policy. One day there was 2’ of untracked snow and they didn’t drop all the ropes with rain forecast the next day?

I’m sure over the years they’ve lost a lot of revenue. I’ve driven past many times to ski Platekill .

My last trip was a couple years ago and I recall a local being absolutely livid over the lift issues. Sounds like last year was better.

Love the place but hate it too!
New owners hopefully will learn from past mistakes!
 
I have skied Elk starting back in 1990. This was before their last major expansion when they added the quad and trails on that side around 1994.

That’s 30 years ago, not much since then. Their major focus is the Race program. Kids season passes are almost the same price as Adults.
My son and I had season passes their for 4 seasons.He was in the Race program for three of those seasons.
They really learned how to keep the area really nice pretty low budget. The reason we left for a SKI 3 is because their season is so short for the money we paid for our passes. They have 100 day guarantee for your season pass only if you return the next season . We did get 31% back on our 2017 season passes.
 
Elk has never embraced any discount tickets. Early season late season Warren Miller and a fund raiser remembering a child.
As I said before they have a great season pass base.
 
Any idea why Elk hasn't joined Indy Pass? It seems to be right in their bread basket.
Because the owner is an ahole and constantly fails at customer service.

He has a 40+ year feud with the original land owner of the Village of Four Season Townhouses. He has multiple lawsuits with the Village of Four Season townhouses that abut the ski area. The lawsuits are about a gate for townhouse access, snowmaking water access which the VOFS controls, sewage lines that Elk dug though the VOFS property without permission, fights with local ski shops over nonsense, it goes on and on. It seems the individual townhouse owners in the VOFS are not allowed to buy Elk season passes (only day passes), but I have not seen anything official on this.

Here is some older stuff, but some of it continues today:
 
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