Sugarloaf has a very small snowmaking plant to serve a very large piping system, one of the first things that the new owners could do to help with the snowmaking system is to increase the compressor capacity.Geoff wrote:I mostly agree with this.boston_e wrote:For purley "on the mountain" experince, Sugarloaf is the best. (Trails, Terrain, Veticle, Lack of Crowds etc)
As I get older, the Picklebarrel style sceen is less and less important to me and the Loaf has enough ski pubs to keep me satisfied.
Problem still is that Killington is 3 hours from Boston and The Loaf is 4+ which makes a big difference to the weekend warrior and is much of the reason my house is at Killington.... also when we started with the house the party nightlife was much more important to me.
If I were starting from scratch now, I'm not so sure Killington would be the spot I pick.
Where I live, Sugarloaf is only an extra 30-40 minutes so it's not quite the same distance penalty. For me, it's the exact same highway mileage to White River Junction or Augusta (110 miles). Killington is 33 miles of secondary roads on Rt 4 and takes 45-50 minutes. Sugarloaf is 75 miles of secondary road on Rt 27.
Sugarloaf does have some problems...
We skied there twice midweek last February trying to evaluate whether we wanted to change mountains. The ASC malaise was far worse there than at Killington. They hadn't made snow on a solid half of their snowmaking terrain and they'd had severe wind scouring problems that blew most of the cover off the natural snow trails. Unlike a Killington or Sugarbush where you have somewhere to hide when it's windy, Sugarloaf is one big peak completely exposed to the weather so there are a lot of days when most of the place is on wind hold.
I'd only been there for epic good conditions so it was educational to see it on bad days because the place skied very small both times I was there last winter. We'll keep an eye on the place. When it's good, it's very good. The property prices and property tax rate are certainly attractive. The place has a great low key vibe. If it's run properly under new ownership, I'd likely be willing to deal with the wind hold days.
As far as wind is concerned, it's really only a problem above Spillway X-Cut, and one can reach alot of good skiing at Sugarloaf on a windy day by skiing on the long side of Double Runner and using the Bateau T-Bar.
I spent 8 days at Sugarloaf this April, including the week of April 13th-19th, when we got 6' of snow in 5 days time, and we had very little trouble with the high winds that caused so much havoc further south.