Industry News
While not as big as the Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine resorts that dominate eastern skiing, Hunter Mountain, NY is about to get bigger. The $9 million Hunter North project is underway and will open for the coming season, and the mountain’s owner, Peak Resorts, claims it is the largest ski area expansion in the East in the past 15 years. Hunter North will add five all-new trails, complete with snowmaking, but perhaps more importantly, four large gladed areas in between them, increasing the skiable acreage by 25%, and increasing glade skiing alone by a massive 800%, reports Forbes.
The new trails will be serviced in three and a half minutes by a new high-speed 6-pack chair making it the only mountain in New York State with two 6-packs. To better access the new lift and area, Hunter North is also getting its own all new entrance, parking lots and satellite base lodge.
Compared to industry giants Vail Resorts and Alterra Mountain Company, Peak Resorts is a small player, but they are big in the Northeast, where half of the company’s 14 resorts are located. The best known of these is Mount Snow, one of Vermont’s major destination ski resorts, and like Hunter, known for being the closest and most accessible in the Green Mountain State to the New York metro area, over a full hour closer than most competitors.
Peak Resorts is also spending another $22 million on its new flagship Carinthia Base Lodge at Mount Snow, where it anchors the East’s top terrain park. Built 10-years ago, the Carinthia park area was and still is pretty revolutionary in the world of skiing and snowboarding, with nine terrain parks including a superpipe spread across its own 100-acre mountain face. This comes on the heels of last season’s $30 million snowmaking upgrade, giving Mt. Snow some of the most reliable conditions in the east.
Like it’s bigger competitors, Peak Resorts has created its own multi-mountain season pass product, the Peak Pass. It offers unlimited skiing and riding at seven northeastern mountains in Pennsylvania, New York, New Hampshire and Vermont, the biggest of which are Mt. Snow, Hunter and Attitash and Wildcat in NH.
