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Jack
from West Chester
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Jan 13, 2008 |
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Overall Rating: 2.4   |
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the 1000' vertical is a joke since you have to do a 400 yard nearly flat run out at the bottom of the mtn to get to the lift just so the management can say they have a 1,000'+ mtn. High speed lifts are great but I never can get my edges sharp enough to handle the bullet proof ice.
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Ed
from Downingtown, pa
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Jan 1, 2008 |
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| Overall Rating: 2.8 |
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ICE Mountain is the best way to describe this place. The uphill capacity of the two high speed lifts is impressive, but why bother when you face a mountain of ice when you get off the lift. Learn how to make snow and groom the mountain correctly!
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Casey
from Clinton, NJ
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Dec 13, 2007 |
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| Overall Rating: 2.8 |
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As far as the Mid-Atlantic is concerned, the terrain at Blue Mountain is so-so. If you aren't into the terrain park, you wont find much in the way of a challenge. I've been there many times and have had mixed experiences.
The night skiing is good because it isn't crowded and it's cheaper. Honestly four or five hours is plenty of time to do everything Blue has to offer. NEVER GO ON SATURDAY! I've tried Saturdays at Blue and I find them to be overcrowded frustrating. The lifts are constantly stopping too because there are A LOT of beginners there.
Overall, Blue is a good local place to spend an evening in the park or on Barney's bumps, but don't waste your money skiing on Saturday.
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Abe
from New York CIty
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Jun 24, 2007 |
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| Overall Rating: 4.2 |
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This is our favorite local mountain, and it's certainly one of the best ones in the vicinity of NYC.
One of Blue Mountain's strongest points is night skiing (4-10 pm; all of the trails are lit). There are at least three reasons why we always go for night skiing at the Blue:
1. The crowds are much thinner;
2. It's cheaper;
3. You don't have to wake up early on a weekend day.
Also, I find it easier to ski at night: as the light comes from sideways the moguls cast a shadow and are clearly visible, whereas on overcast days there's hardly any shadow at all.
Snow is generally well groomed, much better that at the Hunter for example, although it can get quite icy sometimes. The trails are good, best for beginners and intermediate skiers; excellent green and blue trails. The two double blacks are good but similar to each other; the black trails are a good step up from the blue ones. There are several terrain parks. Also, there are several excellent school hills at both Valley and Summit lodges.
Service is usually very good, the staff are friendly and helpful. Rental equipment used to be excellent but seems to have been so-so the last couple of seasons. I was surprised to read about stolen items because you can check in your equipment for free, a very useful service indeed. The lifts at the Valley lodge are more than adequate: a high-speed quad and a high-speed six-pack. These serve mostly the greens and double-diamonds. For black and blue trails, however, there are a couple of slow lifts up the mountain that can get annoying, so sometimes we ski all the way to the bottom just to take a high-speed lift back up.
Speaking of the lows, daytime temperatures are usually only a couple degrees lower that in NYC, so it can easily get icy at night (unlike the Catskills, where it's usually quite a bit colder than in the city). It does have the largest drop in the Poconos, but black and blue trails don't utilize all of the drop, only the greens and double diamonds. Also, compared to other local mountains, it has fewer trails.
Still, it makes for some of the best skiing in the Poconos and elsewhere around New York. Camelback now has night skiing too, but I was disappointed - it was commercial and impersonal, not nearly as cozy as the Blue, and the trails were shorter. The Hunter is expensive and the snow is horrible. Belleayre is good but you have to either stay there overnight or wake up at 5 am to get there in time. So the Blue Mountain, where you can easily drive if you feel like skiing and then head back home, remains my favorite.
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Dean
from Delaware
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Feb 18, 2007 |
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| Overall Rating: 2.6 |
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Blue Mountain has its good points and bad points. I'll cover both but please consider that I was there with my wife and 4 kids on President's Day Weekend with ideal skiing conditions. Read: it was jammed packed.
Before I go into my Highs and Lows, here are a couple of tips, especially important if you have toddlers and will use the day care:
TIPS
1. As always go early
2. Top lodge gets busier quicker than the bottom lodge (they have two), but the child care is only available in the top lodge. Drop everyone in your party (except your toddler) at the bottom lodge so they can get their tix and rentals quickly. Drive up to the top lodge with your toddler (4-minute drive). check him in, get your own ticket and rental, then ski down to meet the rest of your party. At the end of the day, your party will go to the bottom lodge to turn in their stuff, you'll go to the top lodge, retrieve your toddler, get in your car, meet the rest of your crew down below and head to the pizza joint in Palmerstown.
HIGHS:
1. Varied terraine and a good number of trails for an Eastern PA facility. Far more than Ski Roundtop or Big Boulder, quite a few more than Jack Frost.
2. Two lodges where you can get lift tix and rentals...one at the top and one below (this is also a factor in the downside list, too...I'll explain later). In my experience, the bottom one was less crowded at check-in time.
3. Two really nice long lazy green trails. At other facilities the green trails are too short...after thoughts behind the double black diamond chutes. When you have 4 kids trying once again to get their ski legs under them, a nice long green trail is the trick
4. Excellent use of the tree line on the edge of some of the runs (Tut's Run in particular) lots of little trails in the trees to really test your mettle. I found these to be a pleasure and a challenge.
5. As with the tree line, lots of opportunities to cross from one run to another...lots of little bunny hops to hotdog on.
6. Early lift operations. As early as 7:30!!! that means more skiing.
SO-SOs:
1. Childcare - can't beat the price...$2/hr on weekends, free on weekdays. But you get what you pay for. Use it only as a last resort...kids should be on the slopes.
2. Equipment rentals...I've seen better processes at other facilities. And I didn't appreciate having to go through a pile of a thousand smelly shoes to find my kid's school shoes.
LOWS:
1. We came home short one set of goggles and one helmet ~$90 worth of theft. I've never locked stuff up at a ski resort and never lost anything...till my trip to Blue Mountain. Well, fool me once shame on me...
2. Very slow double chair lifts on the right-side of the mountain...doubly slow when they shut down cross-cutting runs, increasing the volume of skiers on this lift (see below). They should invest in quads here, considering the amount of traffic they get.
3. Not a very intuitive layout to the runs. I noticed at least four bottlenecks at the facility where you are forced to walk up hill to get to a lift that could have been strategically placed just 50 to 100 feet further down the slope. This is not a lot of fun after a couple of hours of skiing with young children.
Also, we spent most of our time on the quads and slopes on the left side of the facility (looking up from the valley lodge), but our son was in the child care center in the mountain top lodge at the top of the right-most run. For some reason, they shut down the only run to get from the left side of the mountain to the right side of the mountain forcing me to go to the bottom of the hill and use the much slower double lifts so I could get to my son at the child care center and feed him lunch. What should have taken 5 minutes took me over an hour. Needless to say, my wife was not happy, and - more important I lost some good downhill time :-)
4. Attitudes of some of the skiers. Sure, the staff were friendly enough (except the Day care staff), but some of my fellow skiers were arrogant - I won't even go into the attitudes of some of the snowboarders. You had marauders haulin' hiney on the greens taking out the newbies and getting upset when some five year old cuts a pie across the slope. Its a GREEN Run, bonehead!
SKI SCHOOL: Can't evaluate the ski schools...didn't use em this time...but wish I had for my 7-year old.
Bottomline. Not a bad place for adults, could have used a little more thought in its design. Would like to try it when there are less crowds and without the smaller kids...presidents day is always a bust for skiing when the conditions are good; the crowds get too big. And this place is way too close to Philly, so you must deal with the City of Brotherly Love's crowds...not to mention its attitude.
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matt
from nj
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Jan 22, 2007 |
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| Overall Rating: 2.6 |
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good big place for pa, 2 high speed lifts, nice amount of trails, good park.....but no one knows how to ski here,..or yell to let you that there behind you.
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Neal Pisanti
from Woodbury, NY
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Feb 11, 2006 |
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| Overall Rating: 4.0 |
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Blue Mountain is a great "local" mountain for those of us from the NY Metro area. The terain doesn't match that found in Vermont or New Hampshire, but it is varied and challenging enough to make the trip from Long Island well worth it. The staff is very friendly and the lift lines are not horrendous like some of the other Pa. resorts.
Another thing I like about Blue Mountain is the length of the runs. They're not the short choppy runs with trails merging every 1000 feet like like many of the local resorts.
