The Mad River Valley is home to two ski resorts that leave you with very different impressions of what a ski vacation is all about.

Conjure up a Hollywood-influenced image of Vermont, and chances are you'll picture the Mad River Valley. It's equal parts Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" and "The Bob Newhart Show." The rolling, pastoral countryside is dotted with clapboard farmhouses, restored barns, restored inns and those iconic Vermont cows. The mountains rise sharply, and sideroads to ski areas wind through ledges cutting the landscape.

Once the playground for the well-to-do, the out-of-the-way Mad River Valley gradually fell out of favor with the "in" crowd and became the place that time forgot. This is a good thing. The valley remains free of large chain hotels, fast-food restaurants and other sprawl. Two small towns, Waitsfield and Warren, provide everything a visitor might need, and do so in that oh-so-Vermont, New York-accented country-store fashion. You may be rusticating, but you needn't do without a fine wine and a fancy meal.

Mad River Glen and nearby Sugarbush Resort are the ying and yang of the Alpine world. They balance each other and manage to entertain everyone from just-happy-to-be-together families to death-defying extreme skiers. Mad River Glen is the way skiing used to be, because, well, little has changed here over the years. Home to one of the few single chairs left in the country, Mad River has almost no snowmaking and no condos. Narrow trails cut down the thickly wooded mountain are merely suggestions of where to ski. Diehards ski all over Mad River Glen, through trees, over frozen waterfalls and down cliffs. Its terrain attracts such a devoted following that Mad River is America's only skier-owned, nonprofit cooperative. Meanwhile, just 7 miles down the road, Sugarbush has lots of snowmaking and plenty of condos and relatively wide trails—from an Eastern point of view.

Mad River Glen is a throwback to earlier ski days, and as one of our contributors put it, "It's the type of skiing that made my mother give up the sport." The ski area prides itself on being tough, and the bumper sticker, "Mad River Glen: Ski It If You Can," is all too true. Trail ratings are not inflated, and even the beginner trails here might be graded intermediate elsewhere. But MRG fans love this area and have shown their devotion by buying shares of this now skier-owned resort. And yes, we mean ski resort; snowboards are not allowed.

MRG is traditional (it's one of two areas in the nation with a chairlift for solo riders), natural (little snowmaking, combined with plenty of tight tree skiing), hardcore (the ski shop at the base sells T-shirts with the slogan, "Friends don't let friends get first tracks") and homey (skiers with serious tracks to carve have got to love a cafeteria with peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches to go). It's a mountain for serious skiers, not poseurs. Leave your Bogner suit on the hanger and don some wool pants. You'll fit right in.

Photographed in the Mad River Valley at Mad River Glen; top photo by T.J. Greenwood; bottom photos by Mike Riddell