Here’s something different: A NEW ski area (of sorts)

There’s been a lot of consolidation in the ski business in the last few decades, as operators who can’t afford new snowmaking equipment fall victim to the demands of good snow coverage and longer seasons.

But do new ski areas ever open? There was the Yellowstone Club in Montana, a “private family ski and golf community” that caters to the super-rich. Echo Mountain,  close to Denver, opened a few years ago, but it’s strictly a terrain park. Last year I was planning to go to Tamarack, a new ski area in Idaho, but those plans were scrubbed when the company went belly-up. A new operation went into Silverthorne, Colorado a couple of years ago, but that’s operated as a super-duper-expert-terrain place. In Michigan (of all places!), Mt. Bohemia advertises itself as having “all-expert terrain,” with “triple diamond” slopes. (And from the reports I’ve heard, there is some legitimacy to those claims.)

So are there any new places for people who aren’t super-rich or into parks or super-steeps? Not exactly, but you can get an existing area to expand from time to time. Consider, Cannon Mountain, New Hampshire. I had the pleasure of riding there back in March of 2008, and found it was a blast. With the help of a powder dump, I could take on some of its steep, twisting, narrow slopes. (In fact, it was one of my best powder days, period.)

One excursion of my day at Cannon was to “poach” the terrain at Mittersill, an adjacent ski area that had closed a few decades before. If you followed the top of one ridge line from the Cannon peak, you could make your way to Mittersill’s slopes, which had been maintained to some degree (clearing brush, mainly) by local volunteers. At that time, the general manager of Cannon told us that he was working with various authorities to secure the right to bring the Mittersill property under his management, and to extend Cannon’s lift service.

Government bureaucracies being what they are, it took a while to tie up all the details, but finally, construction on a new lift has started.  Martin Griff, who writes for various media outlets in New Jersey, recently wrote about it on his blog at NJ.com. (I’ve worked with Martin; we’re both officers in the North American Snowsports Journalists Association.) He offers a few details about the $4 million project.

I like Cannon. It’s an anti-resort, without the endless rows of condos and Prada shops. Adding Mittersill to the mix is on balance a good thing.