Whiteface, NY, Conditions Report: A Mountain from the Rockies, in New York

Report from Saturday, January 18 – Sunday, January 19, 2025

For someone who has never skied Whiteface before, you sure hear a lot about what this place is like as an East Coast skier. It’s icy. It’s absolutely freezing. It’s got a bigger vertical drop than most West Coast ski areas. It offers some of the most challenging in-bounds skiing on the East Coast. It hosted the Olympics. Twice. With all of these ideas and stories in my head, it was about time I actually got up there and skied the place.

Thankfully, for my first time visiting the Lake Placid staple, I experienced neither of the two miserable things (ice and cold) this incredible yet challenging mountain often throws at skiers. Warm weather hovering just below freezing greeted skiers for the weekend on a soft-packed base that consisted of good-quality artificial snow mixed in with a slow accumulation of natural snowfall.

Quick Facts & History

• Date Opened: 1958
• Multi-Destination Pass: n/a
• Number of Trails: 94
• Skiable Acres: 334
• Vertical Drop: 3,166′ (lift-served), 3,430′ (hiking) – most on the East Coast
• Base Elevation: 1,220′
• Summit Elevation: 4,867′
• Average Annual Snowfall: 181″
• Terrain Breakdown:
  • Beginner: 22%
  • Intermediate: 32%
  • Advanced: 25%
  • Expert: 21%
• Number of Lifts: 12
• Night Skiing: no
• Ownership: State of New York
• Other Activities:
  • Scenic gondola rides

When you look at a trail map of Whiteface, the resort seems narrow, and that’s because it is. As a skier, it is easy to consistently wind back up on the same main trails that funnel skiers down this massive vertical drop. For the first couple of runs on my first day, as I began to familiarize myself with the mountain, I found myself doing exactly this, ending up on the Upper/Lower Valley, Northway, or Boreen, over and over and over. But once you get more of a sense of this mountain, you begin to understand how to avoid this common pitfall and go places on the mountain where most people don’t ski.

While you really only have to ride five lifts to most efficiently access the entire mountain, Whiteface offers a dozen, and I found that riding on some of the slow, redundant lifts provided the space and time to recognize how to get some of the hard-to-find trails on the mountain. For example, I enjoyed riding both the Freeway and Upper Whiteface doubles, since they gave easy access to a set of blacks with a nice consistent pitch that most skiers otherwise overlooked. Mountain Run and Upper/Lower Wilderness had no crowds the entire day and stayed in great conditions late into the afternoon.

As the day went on and I continued my exploration of the mountain, the one thing biggest drawback of Whiteface that I observed as an expert skier where the lack of a diverse set of double black diamond trails. The mountain has no cut trail double black diamonds, with the 7 trails with that rating being reserved for glades only. While some of the groomed black diamond trails could easily be double black diamonds at other resorts, I craved more variety when it came to expert trails, especially when there is not enough natural snowfall to open any gladed terrain.

While The Slides and other gladed terrain such as Sugar Valley Glades and Deer Valley Glades bolster Whiteface’s claim as an East Coast advanced skier’s haven, these trails require significant snowfall to fill in and are not easily lapable.

The other weird part about Whiteface’s layout is that it feels small because it’s an odd idea to only ski half of an East Coast resort’s vertical at a time. While it is very common out West to just lap the summit chair, or ski the lower mountain during bad weather, it took me a while to knock my habit of always trying to ski the full vertical to make the most of the mountains on the East Coast. It really doesn’t make sense to do that at Whiteface and most of the time you won’t be spending an entire run skiing the type of trails you want to be on.

Given Whiteface’s notable reputation on the East Coast, I was not optimistic when it came to what I thought the crowds would be like during the MLK long weekend. Yet to my complete surprise, lift lines never exceeded 10 minutes, even for the Face Lift and Cloudsplitter Gondola. The lack of crowds can likely be attributed to Whiteface not being on any multi-mountain pass products, which often cause extreme crowding during peak holidays. While I am sure many Ikon and Epic pass holders wish they could ski Whiteface for free, if its business model works without a multi-mountain pass in the equation, I only see it benefiting current season pass holders and skiers, and making a visit to Whiteface a more pleasant experience.

Conditions

Weather Outlook

Additional Photos

Overall, Whiteface is a terrific mountain that deserves to have its name etched in amongst the top East Coast ski resorts. Not only does it offer an impressive ski experience on paper, but its layout, location, surroundings, and history make it a ski experience that you can get nowhere else on the East Coast. At the same time, its lack of corporate consolidation and resistance to joining any multi-mountain ski passes keep crowds reasonable even on the busiest holiday weekends. For all of these reasons, I’ll be back to Whiteface sometime soon, whether it’s to finally tick The Slides off of my bucket list or simply enjoy another long weekend in the Adirondacks.

For more information, check out Whiteface’s website.