FREESKIER contributor Paddy O’Connell recently took a trip to Utah’s Powder Mountain where he indulged in deep snow shenanigans in the Wasatch. After such a stellar adventure, O’Connell whipped up four reasons why you should make “Pow Mow” your next ski destination.
Powder Power
Powder Mountain, located just 60 miles north of Salt Lake City airport, has basically no grooming. The only corduroy around is a handful of cat tracks and the patchy, homemade pants of the dready après ski jam band. Aside from a delightful lack of groomed trails, Pow Mow’s 500 annual inches of snowfall means lots of deep days. Lift-served bottomless pow not enticing enough? Well, they’ve got cat-skiing, too. When at Pow Mow, you can throw drapes and giant white waves on every run.
Happy Piggy
Pow Mow is one of the most affordable ski resorts in the Milky Way. That is not hyperbole. For its size (see below for hugeness facts), Pow Mow charges less per pass, food, drinks, amenities, high-fives, smiles, and anything else you can slap a barcode on than any other resort in the universe. All day, everyday, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., an adult ticket price is just $79. Night skiing is $27 and a single snow cat ride is $25, or $250 for 11 rides. An early bird adult season pass is $675 and only increases to $870 after June 1. At certain high end, luxury hills, that much dough will afford you a bowl of air and a cup of water… ice sold separately. Additionally, Pow Mow offers crazy-affordable season ticket pricing—more than $200 cheaper—to seniors, military and police, families and teachers. They also knock a few bucks off for loyalty members. Basically, at Powder Mountain, you get much more for far less.
It’s Ginormo-tron
As a mountain, Pow Mow is what some geologists might describe as “f#cking super huge, bro.” Lift-served skiable acres tip the huge-gantic scale at 8,000. Yes, that is correct, eight-flippin’-thousand-acres of glorious shred-tasticness. That’s the most in the U.S. and second in North America only to Whistler Blackcomb. Pow Mow’s cat-skiing operation bumps that up to 8,464 total acres. Suffice to say, there’s every type of terrain option available: hike-to, technical steeps, rolling meadows, well-spaced glades, cocktail turns, gangbuster party shred lines, throw your tenderloin to infinity and beyond cliffs, wrigglin’ friendship turns and everything in-between. It’s rumored Pow Mow will begin printing trail maps on rolls of paper towels in order to fit all of the runs and aid in skier drool cleanup. All this terrain and nobody is around but you and your buds…
They’ve got a bouncer, man
Ok, not really, but kind of. In an effort to ensure the overall “Yippeeee!” fun factor of the skier experience, Powder Mountain has a remarkable quality control standard: They limit skier traffic. “Our goal is to preserve the Powder Mountain experience. We have been known as a low key, family oriented, powder paradise resort,” explains Powder Mountain marketing manager JP Goulet, “So, we decided to cap our day tickets at 2,000 daily and season passes at 3,000 annually to preserve the pow. On any given day at Pow Mow, you will have more than two acres to yourself.” That means untracked snow for everyone. It’s pretty damn refreshing that the bottom line for this resort is not dolla-dolla bills, rather an uncompromising promise of a deep, fresh snow experience.
Pow Mow has long been Utah’s gem and it may just always be that way. Even with this year’s addition of two new lifts in the resort’s southeast corner, Mary’s and Village Lift, management wanted to keep the Pow Mow experience and the character of the resort intact, hence the daily skier cap. From a business perspective, one would think that adding lifts and expanding by 850 acres would be the tip of the marketing spear. But Pow Mow did it quietly and unassumingly. Because just like true diehard skiers on super deep days, the goods are better to be whispered about than shouted. And from the Summit Group who owns the resort to Mark Schroetel the general manager to JP Goulet, everyone who works at Powder Mountain is a diehard skier. You’ll find them slicing down James Peak or crushing Powder Country road laps most days that end in “y.” Diehard skiers love skiing deep, untracked, perfect blower pow. And that’s in abundance at Pow Mow… just don’t tell anybody.
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