Bargain Skiing? Yes, It’s Possible.
By SETH KUGEL
I don’t own skis and I haven’t been on a chairlift this millennium. My winter clothing is so woefully insufficient after spending the last two years in balmy Brazil that the warmest jacket in my possession is a black leather number with a broken zipper. I didn’t even own a hat and gloves until a recent knuckle-numbing emergency led me to drop $10 on a Chinatown street corner.
That would explain how perplexed I was at the tiny little skis the man was trying to rent me at Whiteface ski resort during my bargain overnight escape in December.
“Why are these things so short?” I said.
“I guess it’s been a long time since you’ve been skiing,” he said.
Moments later I was bemoaning my long absence from the slopes with the teenage girl who was checking lift tickets as I got ready for my first ascent of the mountain that claims to have the biggest vertical drop of any ski resort in the East.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said as she held her scanner up to my lift ticket bar code. “It’s like riding a bicycle.”
Understood, but how long have they been scanning lift tickets every time you go up the mountain? What was next, magnetized ski poles that would magically pop back up from the ground if a skier stupidly drops one from the chairlift 30 seconds into the ride?
Understood, but how long have they been scanning lift tickets every time you go up the mountain? What was next, magnetized ski poles that would magically pop back up from the ground if a skier stupidly drops one from the chairlift 30 seconds into the ride?
Um, no, as I found out shortly. But no matter, thanks either to parabolic technology or to my being in decent shape because of my recent dedication to Bikram yoga, I was soon barreling down the slopes like a teenager myself, remembering just how great it feels to zoom past snow-covered pines, with wind whipping harmlessly past goggles, and smooth turns fueled by a flapjack and bacon breakfast just moments earlier.
So why hadn’t I been skiing in so long? I guess because I thought it was simply too expensive for anyone without the dedication to have his own equipment or some kind of season pass. But it turns out that even if you’re a rusty or unprepared skier like me — with no equipment, no car, no one to share hotel costs — you can plan a trip to the Lake Placid area with a budget of less than $300.
Whiteface seemed the obvious choice. It is in Wilmington, N.Y., right near Lake Placid, and at 300 miles from New York City was just barely within tolerable driving range. I went midweek in December, when hotels were empty and presumably desperate for customers. Not everyone can do that, of course, but on the other hand, I was traveling alone and just about all the bargain packages are based on double occupancy, so I had to wrangle up my own deals. (Let’s call it even.)
A slew of calls to hotels that I found on Lake Placid’s tourism office Web site led to the very friendly staff at Gauthier’s Saranac Lake Inn. Stating my (fictitious) case – that I was looking to play hooky from work as long as I could keep costs down – they agreed to give me a $109 special for one night, single-occupancy, significantly less than reserving the room at a $79 rack rate and paying $57 for an early-season lift ticket. (Their best rate for couples is even better: a three-night stay for $199, including lift tickets.)
Equipment rental at the mountain would cost $40, and a plea I put out on my personal Facebook page landed me a cozy, several-layered ski outfit that only cost me a post-midnight trek to my friend’s Greenwich Village apartment to make the pick-up. (He was working long hours and could only meet me that late.)
Though it is possible to get up to Lake Placid by public transportation — taking Amtrak to Westport and a shuttle the rest of the way — the staff at Gauthier’s said it was very tough (though not impossible) to get around town without a car. So I drummed up the best rental I could find, $38 a day for a Chevy Aveo from Enterprise’s office in the Doubletree Suites Hotel in Jersey City — shocked when that beat out every online trick I could think of, including bidding on Priceline.
That Jersey City location also has a few other advantages to renting in the city: the PATH train from Manhattan to right near the office costs less than a subway ride ($1.75 vs. $2.25) and you skip tunnel or bridge tolls ($8) when you return to the city.
When I got to Enterprise, I found out that I had been upgraded to a Jeep Cherokee S.U.V. I was temporarily elated. But that was before I realized my gas budget would have to be more than doubled to $105, putting me past $300 and not doing any favors to the environment, either.
Though it hadn’t snowed yet downstate, five hours later I was entering a Lake Placid region in the throes of a full-on lake-effect snowstorm. I realized that it had been three winters since I’d seen snow, and this was the real thing: big flakes whooshing sideways by the windshield and clinging onto pines and picturesque shingled roofs decked out with Christmas lights. Feeling every bit the tourist, I pulled over the car and started snapping pictures of the Norman Rockwell panorama.
I arrived at Gauthier’s to find an old-school motel retrofitted with comfy beds and organic Tima linens — turns out the owners, two 30-something brothers named Doug and Dan Brownell, along with Doug’s wife, Nicole, have wonFour-Leaf Audubon eco-status for their place, and are in the midst of redoing all the bathrooms in terra-cotta style as well. At the recommendation of Cory, a part-timer who must be the nicest hotel clerk around, I went to the Lake Placid Pub & Brewery, where I had a pint of 46’er pale ale ($4 – her husband’s favorite, I believe she said) and the chicken pot pie ($10 – recommended by the bartender on a break from gossiping with the local crowd).
I turned in early, eager to get to the slopes and be the first in line when the lifts opened at 8:30 a.m. Two obstacles, however, stood in my way: my general laziness, and the pancake, egg and bacon breakfast at a local bakery and deli called Saranac Sourdough. So I got up at 8, got to Sourdough by 9, and to the slopes by 10.
Local retirees, workers who had the morning off, and college students were out in full force. Conversation in the gondola — I had forgotten about that part of skiing — ranged from what classes the students were skipping to a chef talking about the Korean ribs he was going to make that afternoon to talk of someone who had crashed on the first run of the day and broken his leg.
Though the regulars told me that I was only seeing a fraction of the mountain — fewer than a quarter of the trails were open — it looked just great to me. The lake-effect snow had largely blown into the woods, but snow-making equipment made up for it, and a few icy patches just made things more exciting. The scenery was spectacular (on an East Coast scale, I admit), and there were no lines at all for the lifts, meaning I could get in about 10 good runs.
I took my last run at around 3 — not that long before darkness began to fall — and headed to Big Mountain Deli and Creperie for one of their 46 luscious-sounding sandwiches on my way out of town. I suppose that, having already cracked my $300 limit with gas still to be bought, I should have just hit the road and starved myself. But sandwich No. 1, the Marcy — roast turkey, cranberry horseradish sauce, Cheddar, apples and cracked pepper mayo on asiago peppercorn bread — was too good to pass up for $7. Plus, five and a half hours of the NPR-Fox-Elvis-Caliente rotation on the S.U.V.’s satellite radio was more than I could bear on an empty stomach.
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