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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 trailsfrom 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
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