A tiny little hill tucked away in Princeton, Massachusetts, Wachusett Mountain offers locals the opportunity to ski without enduring the long drive north to bigger mountains such as Okemo, Loon, and Sugarloaf. The resort’s jingle is seared into every Central Massachusetts skier’s mind: “Waaa Wa Wachusett, Wachusett Mountain, Mountain Skiing, Minutes Away!”—and it offers exactly that. With the majority of terrain under the lights, Wachusett Mountain brings accessibility to skiing that most Massachusetts natives would not otherwise have.
Growing up in Framingham, Massachusetts, my high school never had a snowboarding program, so it was up to me to get creative in order to cash in on the accessibility of Wachusett. As a 14-year-old freshman, every day of ski season, as soon as school let out, I would beg my mom or grandmother or whoever had four wheels and an engine to give me a ride halfway to the mountain. My older friends who already had their licenses would meet us at the Picadilly Pub on Route 9 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and drive me the rest of the way. Then, the carnage would begin.
At Wachusett, after you master the relatively mellow blues and blacks, the natural progression is to spend your entire night (or day) in the park. For us, it was at night, under the lights, and on snow that was more like a hockey rink than a groomed ski run. We just accepted the extreme punishment of a bail on bulletproof snow as a part of the greater whole because we had so much fun learning tricks together. It’s where I cut my teeth both literally and figuratively to shape the snowboarder I would become over the next 16 years.
Many East Coast pros who share in that experience as groms come back to Wachusett for some laps and a little dose of nostalgia. For years, Wachusett was home to the Holiday Hammers Rail Jam hosted by the Bomb Hole Podcast’s one and only Chris Grenier, a Massachusetts native. In 2016, a young Zeb Powell threw down and won the Holiday Hammers comp. You can often catch Mike Ravelson getting in a couple days a season at Wachusett when visiting Massachusetts from Salt Lake City, Utah, for the holidays as well.
All in all, standing at a modest 2,006 feet elevation, Wachusett is a great little ski area for introducing people to the sport and allowing a place for progression when getting up north or out west for more than a few days each season is not in the cards for most families. It also offers some great authentic ski culture, being a training ground for some of the top pros out there today. Offering 1,000 feet of vertical across 27 trails and eight lifts, there is an even spread of terrain at Wachusett, with beginner terrain accessed from the looker’s leftmost lift, black diamond terrain off the summit, and mostly blues mixed into the rest of the mountain.
Despite the unforgiving conditions at night, Wachusett changed the course of my life, and without it, this Massachusetts boy would not be working as a backcountry guide in Tahoe today. Taking me from loudly exclaiming, “I LOVE SNOWBOARDING!” on the lift after the adrenaline rush of landing my first boardslide all the way to dropping (and sometimes landing) 20-foot cliffs at Kirkwood Mountain in California, I couldn’t have done it without Wachusett night riding to light the fire in me that still burns today.
