So, I decided to take off work yesterday and go skiing. Winter is quickly disappearing. We’ve had an extremely mild winter here in the midwest, so I’m guessing that the midwest resorts have had a tough time of it this year.

Anyway, I wanted to go skiing. Living in Champaign is a rough thing if you like skiing. The nearest slopes are about 3 hours away, and they are actually south of here. I’ve been to the one in St Louis (Hidden Valley) and Paoli Peaks in Indiana. They are both OK for the midwest. Perfect North is another one in Indiana that I have been wanting to try out, but haven’t had a chance. For yesterday, though, these three were all out of the picture. It is just too warm this far south. It was supposed to be 60 here yesterday, and I think they were predicting 70 degrees for St Louis. Not good skiing weather. So, I started to look north. weather.com has a handy ski resort finder where you can give it your zip code, and it gives a list of the closest resorts. Chestnut Mountain in Galena, Illinois seems to be a favorite that is about 5 hours drive time from Champaign. I also investigated a resort in lower Michigan called Bittersweet (about 4.5 hours drive time). The factors that I was looking at included drive time and vertical elevation drop. Other things, such as price and reviews were secondary. Chestnut Mountain has about 400 foot vertical. Bittersweet was 380 or so. Then I discovered Alpine Valley in Wisconsin. Supposedly only 3.5 to 4 hours drive time, with 488 foot vertical. The reviews seemed to indicate that it was acceptable. And, Wednesday happened to be Men’s day, with $22 lift tickets for guys. (more on that later)

So, with the decision made for Alpine Valley, additional work took place. Tuesday night I got everything packed, planned a bit on the food situation, and tried to go to bed early. I had the alarm set for 5:00am. The resort opened at 10am, so I figured I had my 4 hours to get there if I got out of the house by 6. I ended up rolling out of bed at 5:15, and was out the door at about 5:48. The trip up was pretty uneventful. Sunrise wasn’t even all that impressive. I didn’t run into any precipitation. The weather forecast the night before had predicted some freezing drizzle in the ski resort area from 8-10am, but when I checked the forecast before leaving the house they had removed that. They were predicting rain in the afternoon, though.

I got to the resort about 9:25. I got my lift ticket and walked around a little bit. The resort area consists of 4 or 5 buildings that look somewhat european. They have hotel rooms off to one side that might be interesting if you wanted to stay there for extended lengths of time. There is also a Pro shop (which was closed at the time) and a cafe.

I then took a few pictures and walked around some. By that time it was about 9:45, so I got changed into my ski clothes and prepared to hit the slopes!

Three lifts were running: Valley Flyer, E-Z Rider (both high speed quads) and Mohawk chair (slower chair). Valley Flyer goes to the top of the “mountain”, and the other two go to points on either side of the top. Valley Flyer seemed to service Blacks, so I took that. First run of the day at a new resort.. Ya, I went with a Black. First run down was Lodge Express, followed by Big Thunder. I’d say that Big Thunder is the hardest run there. It’s steeper than the rest at the top. It was followed later by the rest of the runs there: E-Z Does It off of the E-Z Rider lift, Timber Gulch, Timber Trail, Valley View (a lot of poling! No lifts running near the bottom of it), E-Z Pass, First Chance, First Adventure, Broadway, Half Way, East Pass, Cut Throat, Sheltered Valley, Northwest Pass, and the Mohawk Terrain Park… The number of runs sounds more impressive than it actually is. For instance.. To get from the top of the hill to bottom, you could say that you completely ran East Pass, the top half of Mohawk Terrain Park, complete Northwest Pass, complete Cut Throat, complete Half Way, and the bottom half of Lodge Express. So, in normal terms, I’d say that there are about 8 ways down the hill. The rest are just little bits and pieces that jut off here and there.

Crowds were non existent. Lines were non existent. The resorts breaks the skiing up into two time slots. The first goes from 10am - 5:30pm, and the second from 3pm - 10pm. For the first part of the day I would literally say there were probably 30 people on the entire mountain. About 28 of them were men. Maybe 29. Thursdays are apparently Women’s day. It would be interesting to go there on a Thursday and see what the “crowds” look like. Later in the afternoon a few extra people showed up. Around 5:00 I started seeing a few school-aged kids. It was very dead. In most of my pictures you don’t see a single person on the runs. Very uncrowded. Probably 4 or 5 lift rides were with other people. The rest were all by myself.

And I took a lot of lift rides. I would estimate the loop time (lift plus ski run) was about 4-5 minutes. I took a couple of breaks during the course of the day. About 10:30 am I went back to the truck to get my better gloves. About 11:15 or so I went back to the truck and picked up my camera, and dropped it off back at the truck at 11:45. At that time I ate lunch (peanut butter and jelly sandwich, pringles, and some fruit). Going to the truck was a minor affair. I could literally go from slope to truck and back to slope in about 5 minutes. That’s the beauty of a midwest resort. You can park right next to the snow, which means you are parking mere feet from the ski lift.

The snow was good yesterday. I felt, once again, that I was able to work on my technique. The runs weren’t hard, but they were steep enough that I could work on my skills, which is great. The main complaint I guess I had was about the wind. The wind was blowing pretty good yesterday, particular at the top of the hill. I can’t really blame the resort for that, though.

While the sunrise was very uneventful, the sunset from the hill was really nice. It was cloudy most of the day, but the line of clouds stopped an inch or two over the horizon, so the sun had a chance to peek through around 5pm. The snow took on a beautiful golden glow and it was really nice to see. On my last run, the I started getting a few drops of rain on me. It was 5:30 at the time, so I decided it was time to go. I headed back to the truck and got changed out of my ski clothes and was leaving at about 5:45. I had to stop for gas about 30 minutes later, at which point I got a double cheeseburger extra value meal at McDonalds (I didn’t need it, but it tasted good). Then, I just drove back home. While the lift ticket cost me $22, I probably spent over twice that on the gasoline required to get there and back (and $2 toll for the section of I-39 around Rockford, Illinois.) So, that’s the way it goes, I suppose.

All things considered, a successful day. Alpine Valley would be a great resort for beginners. You could go there for a couple of days and be in good shape to tackle the greens in Colorado!

I’ve been to a couple of other Wisconsin resorts since then, including Cascade Mountain and Devil’s Head.