Montage Mountain, P.A 1/16/06

Date Skied: January 16th, 2006

Area skied: Montage Mountain

Surface Conditions: Packed Powder, loose machine made powder.

My son and I spent the day at Montage, which is a area that is owned by the state of Pennsylvania and is located in the greater Scranton area.

We started out the day at 9:45 and we skied until 2:15pm. The first thing that I noticed was that this is an expensive place to ski as they charged me $45 for a ticket and $35 for my son. The second thing that we noticed right away was how good the snow conditions were right after a major thaw/rain/freeze event.

Our first run was down Mainline which is a gentle green trail good for warming up our bodies in the low
teens F weather. For those of you not familiar with Montage, the mountain has two parts, a gentle upper mountain with green/blue trails, and a lower valley section with steep legitimate single and double black diamond trails.

The mountain was only 50% open, but we did get to ski on Cannonball (single black) and Smoke (double black). The two steepest trails on the mountain, White Lightning and Boomer where closed but had massive amounts of snowmaking going on on both trails all day long.

The Montage brochure claims that White Lighning has a 70 pitch and is the most difficult trail in Northeastern P.A. I wish it where open as it looked like fun.

Upper mountain:



Warning sign at the top of the Smoke Trail



Snowmaking on Lightning and Boomer:

I can't believe they are charging that much now!!!!! Damn, you know what, I'm happy I don't work there anymore, thats bad for business, and whats bad for business is bad for instructors.

Anyway, yeah, I say it all the time, the "hole" as we call it, is no joke.

Cannonball is a decent run, and smoke, well, I broke my ankle on that trail, but i was screwing around with other instructors and shouldnt have even been doing what I was doing. Should have also buckled my boots. You can get some nasty air off that headwall.

Boomer is my favorite trail there. Just a really nice, challenging run and of decent lenth for that far south.

White Lightening, oh how we cherish you. 70 deg pitch is no lie. I've actually seen that trail avalance more then once. Nothing dangerous, although could be to some younger kids. That trail doesnt hold snow very well, and the snowmaking is out dated. The crews spend half the day with blowtorches defrosting the system. I'm surprised boomer is closed, usually they open that before smoke.

Glad you had fun there. Wish more people would check it out, it truly is a nice mountain (just run like crap) The food there is also digestable, which puts it in the top 9 out of 10.

I was very suprised at the price that they charged for my son, $35 is excessive for a 5 year old. You have to be UNDER 5 to ski for free, I have NEVER seen that before.

They actually have some very modern snowmaking in place in spots. They have computerized York tower guns in the beginner area and around the base lodge. These guns have a digital screen what displays the current weather conditions, ie dewpoint and temperature as well as a touch pad keyboard.

They look to be frugal with snowmaking as Upper and Lower Runaway and Fast Track were bare to the bone, but looked like nice top to bottom runs.

The base lodge was nice and modern with a large fireplace that had leather sofas in front of it.

Sofas are new, but the bar has always been nice and the base lodge was always modern. I prefere the "rustic look"

Yeah, they have like 4 york guns if I remember. But nothing extensive. To survive that far south, you need snowmaking tech.

YOUR SON IS 5!!!!!! The politics must really be affecting the mountain bad. The political affiliation was always their downfall. The ski school has always been well run. Excellent instructor training. I went from eh skiier to pretty good there. Most of the reason I consider myself expert now is from skills I learned while working there. They really care about the quality of their instructors.

They did an excellent job with the snowmaking, packed powder was prevelant in about 75% of the open terrain.

I can see what you mean by the weak snomaking, but if they are state owned, then they will not have a large snowmaking budget, and the weather this year is bad for ALL northeastern ski areas.

We had fun, and we will return to ski there again soon.

Don't waste your time going back to Montage. When you're back in the area go to Elk. It's only about a half hour away, has the same vertical off of 4 of 5 lifts instead of 1, and your son would have skied for free.
Elk is consistantly rated the best in PA in every category.
This year Montage dropped out of the State discount voucher program. If they lost $60K last year, I wonder how much they will lose this year?
The weather has not been good this year for any ski area in PA, but I think that Montage is skimping more on the snow making than all of the others based on their % open reports.
I left a response on your Camelback report. PM me if you want to know how to save on PA lift tickets.

their only charging 20$ now. i love montage its my second home.

So...does the Smoke trail really live up to the warning sign?

Just curious...I haven't tried a "double black" anywhere yet so I haven't seen any signs like this.

Here is a picture of Warren just below the headwall of the Smoke trail. The picture does not due good justice to indicate steepness, but the portion above Warren is quite steep for about 4-8 turns worth. It was WAY beyond Warrens ability and he took a fall and slide down it for a bit as it had some ice in spots, but he was okay and skied down the rest of the way.

Montage later turned on the tower guns, and I left Warren in the beginner area and had some nice man made powder turns on this trail.



I honestly think that the warning signs are needed more so because all of the upper mountain is fairly flat, and the lower mountain trails drop off quite suddenly.