Greek Peak: Back for the First Time

With all the excellent reports that have been posted here this season, my wife and I were hoping that our four-day trip to Syracuse might be a good opportunity to score some of the upstate powder we’d been seeing on TV.

A sobering weekend forecast took that off the table and while driving north from New Jersey under gloomy skies, it looked like we were lined up for one of those “at least we’re skiing” kind of days.

But almost on cue, our luck changed while crossing the state line into New York’s Southern Tier. The clouds parted, the sun came out, and by the time we pulled into Greek Peak around 10 am, it was pushing 40 degrees with deep blue skies above.

As a Central New York native, I know that those sorts of days don’t happen often in winter, which made us feel like we’d gotten a late Christmas gift.

Walking toward the base lodge, I started ticking through a whole list of firsts that were on the docket. It was my first trip upstate since my mother moved out of the area five years ago (I forgot how much I love the open rural landscapes). It was our first ski day this season, more than a month behind schedule).

It was also the first time that we’d be using Indy Passes. How great is it to only ski the places that haven’t been absorbed into the mega-pass empire? Finally, it was the first time my wife and I had skied together since before the pandemic. Hard to believe given how much we enjoy it.

I counted maybe 75 cars in the parking lot; however, once we got booted up and on the hill, it felt like a private ski area. We ran into virtually no one on the trails or on the lifts. The sun and mild temperature had turned the cover into soft springlike sugar and I ducked into a couple of glades that held surprisingly decent cover. Greek’s 900 feet of vertical were more than enough for our out-of-shape legs.

The was also the first time I’d been to Greek Peak in 16 years — long enough for me to see that some things had changed significantly while others hadn’t changed at all. Since my previous visits in the 2000s, I knew that Greek has leaned hard into becoming four-season operation with a number of destination-resort extras; however, it’s wrapped around a ski area that’s still very old-school at heart.

While fixed-grip chairs from the ’60s and ’70s are still doing the majority of the uphill transport, Greek has added a lot of snowmaking firepower in recent years, which showed on a day when coverage was far better than the forecast suggested. The base lodge downstairs feels more or less frozen in time, but upstairs the roomy Trax Pub offers a comfortable place to relax, with a solid beer selection and good food.

With empty slopes, soft snow, and no pressure to chase conditions or rack up vert, the day unfolded at an easy pace. It wasn’t the powder day we’d imagined a few weeks earlier, but it turned out to be a great — if belated — first day back on snow.