Alpine Mountain, PA 2/12/11

Teaching your kid to ski definitely makes you diversify your portfolio.

Other than an occasional visit to Camelback for night skiing on my way home from Central New York, I never thought much about skiing in the Poconos. I knew that there were a couple other popular family ski areas: Jack Frost/Big Boulder and Shawnee.

The only reason I knew about Alpine Mountain was because it was on the way to my brother’s house in Promised Land State Park.



Every time I drove by on Route 447 and saw those peeling 60s-era billboards, I figured that the ski area had closed years ago.




But since my five-year-old doesn’t need 2,000+ vertical feet at this point in his ski career, I went online and found out that Alpine was still in operation. So last weekend, we went through the woods and over the river to scenic Analomink, PA.




I was shocked to find the parking lot nearly full. There were easily a couple hundred cars there, all families with kids, but no lines at the lifts. Alpine is supposed to only have about 500 verts (that’s being very charitable, in my opinion), but it was a great place to bring the boy, and I dug the NELSAP-y old-school vibe.





Claude had a great time hauling down the gently-pitched trails.


And hanging out with Daddy.

Ha! Teaching my kid to ski has UNdiversified my portfolio, if that was possible.

I've only skied Camelback, once in college, and Blue a few times as it's the closest hill to HR South. I'd never heard of Alpine.

Is the boy rippin' the blue trails yet? Word on the street is he's a natural.

Love the road art.

Harvey44 wrote

Ha! Teaching my kid to ski has UNdiversified my portfolio, if that was possible.

I'd highly recommend you take this opportunity, while your daughter's young, to go check out some beginner ski areas. It's a fun way to see "new" places -- especially those closer to home. If it had been 30-40 years ago, she might have spent time at Harvey Mountain!

It's amazing how, when with a small fry who's learning, you look at smaller hills with different eyes -- instead of saying, "it's not steep enough, long enough, deep enough," you make different terrain choices. Claude and I spent the entire afternoon going down easy blue trails, but on one run we found ourselves screaming down a short, but steep blackish pitch and ended up tumbling into the woods. He laughed; I was less amused sliding face-first into a maple tree.

We're continuing to put Claude in lessons (he's booked at Camelback on Saturday), but my procedure is to do 50% lessons, 50% free skiing with me and/or the wife. At this point, it's back-breaking at times, but I'm finding it to be a great bonding experience and I honestly think that I'm teaching him other things than what he's learning from instructors (i.e. going really fast, keeping the skis parallel instead always going to a wedge).

In other news, as you can see in the following pic and others in the original post, the Poconos also got that same rogue lake effect storm cell that hit the Catskills and ADKs. Although skies were clear the entire day, it dumped for an hour in the mid-afternoon (we even had 15 minutes of a sunny snowstorm), then cleared again.

Jamesdeluxe wrote

It's amazing how, when with a small fry who's learning, you look at smaller hills with different eyes -- instead of saying, "it's not steep enough, long enough, deep enough," you make different terrain choices. Claude and I spent the entire afternoon going down easy blue trails, but on one run we found ourselves screaming down a short, but steep blackish pitch and ended up tumbling into the woods. He laughed; I was less amused sliding face-first into a maple tree.

Nice.

At Gore the first chair lift a beginner rides, when they've graduated beyond the two Poma, is the Sunway Chair. The mid station actually serves "steeper terrain" than the ride all the way up. Jamboree is one of the trails from the mid, and until I was stealth lurking on Jambo during one of Neve's lesson's I didn't realize that the upper half is actually 2x as steep as the lower half of the trail.

When I picked her up at the end of the lesson:

"Neve! You SMOKED the Jambo HEADWALL."

After I explained to her what a headwall was, she invented a song she still sings:

"Steeper is faster, faster is better."

Next time we are up, we're taking our first ride as a family off the Gondola.

I'm diggin it.

If you can tear yourself away from UncasJamboreeLiesRumorChatiemacSagamoreTahawas for once (very doubtful ), maybe the four of us can go skiing in the Poconos one of these weekends.

ouch!!

I liked your TR on alpine. We had a season pass there in 1979 when it was Timber Hill. Our oldest son was also 5 at the time. It brought back some good memories. Thanks, Duck T R