oakapple
New member
I skied Belleayre yesterday. Waiting till Monday was definitely the right choice, as several people told me that it was extremely crowded on Sunday. (Belleayre’s lodges are especially bad on busy days: the trails have more capacity than the lodges do.) Yesterday wasn’t busy at all, and I don’t think I ever waited more than 5 minutes for a lift. Temperatures were in the single digits in the morning, warming up to the low 20s later on, but fortunately there was not much wind.
I’m an intermediate skier who ventures on black diamonds only with great caution. But I can see why expert skiers are not fond of Belleayre. Although it has some good expert slopes (at least by my reckoning), most of them are followed by very long intermediate run-outs, to get back to a chair lift. Someone who prefers to ski only on black would probably find that they waste too much time at Belleayre.
I also think that a lot of Belleayre’s blues would be coded green at other places. Roaring Brook and Deer Run, which are both blue, seem to me no more difficult (and arguably, they are easier) than Great Eastern and Great Northern at Killington, which are green. Most of the black diamonds I tried seemed to me legitimately black, although the Area 51 terrain park is ridiculously coded double-black, when it should be blue.
For a state-run resort, they’ve got a pretty good snow-making and grooming program. Several of the blues were left ungroomed, which gave this cautious mogul skier the chance to practice the bumps on trails that don’t have much pitch. The signature Belleayre Run was groomed on one side, but left bumpy on the other, for those who want that. The terrain was about 95 percent open.
I’m an intermediate skier who ventures on black diamonds only with great caution. But I can see why expert skiers are not fond of Belleayre. Although it has some good expert slopes (at least by my reckoning), most of them are followed by very long intermediate run-outs, to get back to a chair lift. Someone who prefers to ski only on black would probably find that they waste too much time at Belleayre.
I also think that a lot of Belleayre’s blues would be coded green at other places. Roaring Brook and Deer Run, which are both blue, seem to me no more difficult (and arguably, they are easier) than Great Eastern and Great Northern at Killington, which are green. Most of the black diamonds I tried seemed to me legitimately black, although the Area 51 terrain park is ridiculously coded double-black, when it should be blue.
For a state-run resort, they’ve got a pretty good snow-making and grooming program. Several of the blues were left ungroomed, which gave this cautious mogul skier the chance to practice the bumps on trails that don’t have much pitch. The signature Belleayre Run was groomed on one side, but left bumpy on the other, for those who want that. The terrain was about 95 percent open.
