Geoff
Well-known member
As a Killington regular, I'd like to respond to the locked thread. No flames.... just a somewhat different point of view....
The Killington I ski is usually fairly uncrowded. I know the mountain so I know the rythm of the mountain. I boot up in my condo and drive to the pay lot where I always have a slopeside parking spot. At $239 for the season, that parking spot defuses all the morning hassle. The lifts start turning before 8:00 on weekends and you have the mountain to yourself until at least 10:00. At that point, there are plenty of off-the-beaten-track places to ski where you don't risk getting clobbered by tourists. Most of them are natural snow trails that never get groomed. That self-selects the low skill people and you have the benefit that you're not skiing on machine groomed porcelain.
Last weekend, we spent a lot of time on the Snowdon lifts skiing Northstar, Great Bear, and Vagabond. It was cold so nobody was using that part of the mountain at all. There was 6" of fresh snow over edgeable little crusty natural snow bumps. We also spent quite a bit of time on the Southridge triple... also cold and completely ignored. Breakaway was in great shape. Pipe Dream under the lift was a fun puzzle negotiating the pucker brush.
When there's a little more snow, there are hundreds of acres of tree skiing that are completely ignored by 95% of the clientel. At that point, I can go entire weekends without ever skiing on the crowded groomed snowmaking trails other than the runouts back to the lift.
If you don't know the resort, Killington is terrible on weekends. The gondolas and high speed lifts get very crowded. There are choke points all over the mountain that create human pinball. They have far too much uphill capacity so the main snowmaking trails are skied off to a bullet-proof skiing surface by 11:00. Because of all the crowding and dangerous trail intersections, you see the worst of the ugly convergence of aggressive New Yorkers and Bostonians. That's the Killington the occasional visitor sees but it's only one of several possible experiences.
The Killington I ski is usually fairly uncrowded. I know the mountain so I know the rythm of the mountain. I boot up in my condo and drive to the pay lot where I always have a slopeside parking spot. At $239 for the season, that parking spot defuses all the morning hassle. The lifts start turning before 8:00 on weekends and you have the mountain to yourself until at least 10:00. At that point, there are plenty of off-the-beaten-track places to ski where you don't risk getting clobbered by tourists. Most of them are natural snow trails that never get groomed. That self-selects the low skill people and you have the benefit that you're not skiing on machine groomed porcelain.
Last weekend, we spent a lot of time on the Snowdon lifts skiing Northstar, Great Bear, and Vagabond. It was cold so nobody was using that part of the mountain at all. There was 6" of fresh snow over edgeable little crusty natural snow bumps. We also spent quite a bit of time on the Southridge triple... also cold and completely ignored. Breakaway was in great shape. Pipe Dream under the lift was a fun puzzle negotiating the pucker brush.
When there's a little more snow, there are hundreds of acres of tree skiing that are completely ignored by 95% of the clientel. At that point, I can go entire weekends without ever skiing on the crowded groomed snowmaking trails other than the runouts back to the lift.
If you don't know the resort, Killington is terrible on weekends. The gondolas and high speed lifts get very crowded. There are choke points all over the mountain that create human pinball. They have far too much uphill capacity so the main snowmaking trails are skied off to a bullet-proof skiing surface by 11:00. Because of all the crowding and dangerous trail intersections, you see the worst of the ugly convergence of aggressive New Yorkers and Bostonians. That's the Killington the occasional visitor sees but it's only one of several possible experiences.
