jamesdeluxe
Well-known member
- Joined
- Jul 17, 2020
Teaching your kid to ski definitely makes you diversify your portfolio.
Other than an occasional visit to Camelback for night skiing on my way home from Central New York, I never thought much about skiing in the Poconos. I knew that there were a couple other popular family ski areas: Jack Frost/Big Boulder and Shawnee. The only reason I knew about Alpine Mountain was because it was on the way to my brother’s house in Promised Land State Park:
Every time I drove by on Route 447 and saw those peeling 60s-era billboards, I figured that the ski area had closed years ago:
But since my five-year-old doesn’t need 2,000+ continuous vertical feet at this point in his ski career, I went online and found out that Alpine was still in operation. So last weekend, we went over the river and through the woods to Analomink, PA:
I was shocked to find the parking lot nearly full. There were easily a couple hundred cars there, all families with kids, but no lines at the lifts. Alpine is supposed to have about 500 verts (that’s being very charitable, in my opinion), but it was a great place to bring my son and I dug the old-school vibe:
Claude had a great time hauling down the gently-pitched trails:
It's amazing how, when with a small fry who's learning, you look at smaller hills with different eyes -- instead of saying, "it's not steep enough, long enough, deep enough," you make different terrain choices. Claude and I spent the entire afternoon going down easy blue trails, but on one run we found ourselves screaming down a short, but steep blackish pitch and ended up tumbling into the woods. He laughed; I was less amused sliding face-first into a maple tree.
At this point, it's back-breaking at times, but it's a great bonding experience and I honestly think that I'm teaching him other things than what he's learning from instructors (i.e. going fast, keeping the skis parallel instead always going to a wedge).
In other news, as you can see in the following pic and others in the original post, the Poconos also got that same rogue lake effect storm cell that hit the Catskills and ADKs. Although skies were clear the entire day, it dumped for an hour in the mid-afternoon (we even had 15 minutes of a sunny snowstorm), then cleared again:
August 2020 Update
Here's an article from 2017 about what happened to Alpine Mountain. To this day, I drive past the ski area frequently; however, it doesn't look like anything is going on there.
Other than an occasional visit to Camelback for night skiing on my way home from Central New York, I never thought much about skiing in the Poconos. I knew that there were a couple other popular family ski areas: Jack Frost/Big Boulder and Shawnee. The only reason I knew about Alpine Mountain was because it was on the way to my brother’s house in Promised Land State Park:
Every time I drove by on Route 447 and saw those peeling 60s-era billboards, I figured that the ski area had closed years ago:
But since my five-year-old doesn’t need 2,000+ continuous vertical feet at this point in his ski career, I went online and found out that Alpine was still in operation. So last weekend, we went over the river and through the woods to Analomink, PA:
I was shocked to find the parking lot nearly full. There were easily a couple hundred cars there, all families with kids, but no lines at the lifts. Alpine is supposed to have about 500 verts (that’s being very charitable, in my opinion), but it was a great place to bring my son and I dug the old-school vibe:
Claude had a great time hauling down the gently-pitched trails:
It's amazing how, when with a small fry who's learning, you look at smaller hills with different eyes -- instead of saying, "it's not steep enough, long enough, deep enough," you make different terrain choices. Claude and I spent the entire afternoon going down easy blue trails, but on one run we found ourselves screaming down a short, but steep blackish pitch and ended up tumbling into the woods. He laughed; I was less amused sliding face-first into a maple tree.
At this point, it's back-breaking at times, but it's a great bonding experience and I honestly think that I'm teaching him other things than what he's learning from instructors (i.e. going fast, keeping the skis parallel instead always going to a wedge).
In other news, as you can see in the following pic and others in the original post, the Poconos also got that same rogue lake effect storm cell that hit the Catskills and ADKs. Although skies were clear the entire day, it dumped for an hour in the mid-afternoon (we even had 15 minutes of a sunny snowstorm), then cleared again:
August 2020 Update
Here's an article from 2017 about what happened to Alpine Mountain. To this day, I drive past the ski area frequently; however, it doesn't look like anything is going on there.
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