Sally and I took the family to Stratton Mountain last weekend. We drove up on Friday afternoon after Thanksgiving, stayed overnight, and skied Saturday. This marked both our first time at Stratton and our first time skiing Thanksgiving Weekend.
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| Family selfie at Stratton's summit. |
Stratton is one of the most expensive mountains in Vermont, and I gotta be honest, I was a little disappointed. Some of this is undoubtedly down to the time-of-year, but even without that, the mountain itself was a lot smaller than I expected. Stratton is famous for its base village, but it got very crowded when we were there, and they had just one way to the summit from the base. Granted, the eight-person gondola went much faster than I expected, but I can very easily imagine it getting super crowded on legit peak weekends.
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| With Hannah at the summit. |
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| Bromley View Inn common room. |
Stratton has 99 trails and almost 700 skiable acres. However, most of those trails go at most a third of the way down the mountain, linking with other trails to create an interesting grid but fewer ways down than one might expect. That’s good in the sense that you can ski to mid-mountain and then head back up — like Okemo — but in the early season with just 25% of the total acreage open, we had maybe a half-dozen choices to get all the way from top to bottom.
I should note, too, that Stratton is quite steep at the top. Most of the summit trails are Blacks. That’s fine, even preferable, when conditions are good. I didn’t move it, though, once we got into the afternoon and half the fresh snow had been skied off. Skiing icy Blacks is not my idea of a good time. Hell, even the Blue trail Black Bear took me down three times once it got icy, and I got tired.
Stratton has three lodges — a bass lodge, a mid-mountain lodge, and a summit lodge. The summit was closed when we were there, and the base got overwhelmingly crowded. I quite liked the mid-mountain lodge, though, despite not making it to the pub. Probably should’ve just grabbed a beer in lieu of taking that last run on Black Bear.
I’m sure Stratton is great when conditions are good, but alas, we live on the East Coast, where icy conditions are a part of life. We joined the Connecticut Ski Council this year, and with that, my plan is to follow the sales this season. I hope that means we can get back to Stratton on a good day, but the mountain’s overall difficulty and typical price-point make it tough to plan a trip back months or even weeks in advance.
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