WORDS • Erin Spong FEATURED IMAGE • Pete Alport
Imagine a Pacific Northwest paradise where the beer and adrenaline flow as strong as the Deschutes River. The locals thrive on hops of all kinds—in a glass, on skis and even at the local bike park. You’d think I’m talking about Peter Pan’s Neverland, but I’m actually referencing a little place in central Oregon called Bend and its backyard mountain, Mt. Bachelor.
With a population over 100,000, Bend, Oregon, is far from a sleepy ski town. A thriving community dedicated to the outdoors, Bend is truly the best place to be if you enjoy being outside and active year-round. Due to its geographic location, the high-mountain desert climate allows for multi-sport days every day, 365 days a year. Being a beer drinker doesn’t hurt either, with over 30 breweries within the 35 square miles of town. Close proximity to Mt. Bachelor and the Redmond Airport, just one town over, makes everything easy to access here whether your ski-cation is one week or just a weekend.
“Bend is really just one of those ultimate winter towns,” says Tawna Fensky, PR and Communications Manager for Visit Bend. “Mt. Bachelor gets a hefty amount of snow and then you drive 20 miles down the road and there won’t be much snow in town. It’s a great three-sports-in-a-day city where you can go skiing in the morning and hiking, mountain biking, golfing, or trail running the rest of the day. It’s a quirky little thing that we can lay claim to.”
Another quirky little thing Mt. Bachelor can lay claim to? The ability to not only see but ski 360 degrees around the mountain. Being a dormant stratovolcano has its perks, including holding one of the longest seasons of any ski area in the country. A yearly average of 450 inches of snowfall typically opens up the mountain by Thanksgiving and keeps the lifts spinning through the end of May. If you’re a backcountry skier, extend that season well into June by venturing far, high and deep into the surrounding Cascade Mountain range by foot or snow machine.
Mt. Bachelor is one of the largest ski areas in North America, boasting over 4,300 skiable acres and a brand-new six-pack lift, the Skyliner Express, which will open with the 2023-24 season for a total of 15 lifts across the mountain.
“[Skyliner Express] accesses some of the locally favorite terrain, and it really opens up the mountain,” says Lauren Burke, Mt. Bachelor’s Director of Marketing and Communications. “It allows people to move up and across the mountain quicker, and also allows for operation through more inclement weather due to the weight and tension of the larger lift.”
Speaking of, Mt. Bachelor doesn’t necessarily cater to the fair-weather skier. Sure, sunshine and comfortable temperatures are abundant for spring corn harvesting, but mid-winter at Mt. Bachelor can admittedly be a toss-up between frigid temps, high winds and heavy snowfall. If you’re a powder hound, this is all probably music to your ears.
“We get those huge storm cycles that come in with wind, but that’s also what makes the terrain so unique—the wind buff and wind lips that you can play around on across the mountain,” says Burke. “When it’s not snowing, the weather is usually pretty great, but if you’re coming up [in the winter], you never know what you’re going to get, which is all a part of what makes it special here.”
For professional skiers like Sage Cattabriga-Alosa and Lucas Wachs, the constant variability of the mountain is what shaped their creative and fluid styles. There are few skiers as smooth as Cattabriga-Alosa, especially in the big mountains, but Wachs is undoubtedly one of them, and it’s no coincidence they grew up navigating and playing the same volcano. Born and raised in Bend, Wachs is quick to boast about his home mountain.
“The mountain is just super flowy. It’s almost like riding a mountain bike flow trail,” says Wachs. “It’s not the gnarliest mountain ever, but it does have a lot of fun features to get creative on. It made me good at looking at transitions and jumps. People who like skiing Wildcat at Alta, it’s pretty similar to that with natural jumps and hits.”
From natural features like cliff drops and ever-changing wind lips to boost off of from the Summit Lift to more manicured jumps at one of the mountain’s 10 terrain parks, Mt. Bachelor truly has it all for skiers to test their creativity and air-awareness. Even if you prefer to keep your skis on the ground, the Rainbow Chair services the best tree skiing in the region, and Skyliner Express will take you to the fast and furious corduroy everybody knows and loves.
“That’s the beauty of the mountain; there’s a lot of terrain and a lot of different aspects you can ski,” Wachs earnestly explains. “The wind is very real [laughs]. It can obviously not be a good thing, but it does make a lot of cool wind lips and jumps, and sometimes it’ll snow two inches, and then you’ll find some really good deeper deposits out there [but] we get a lot of snow, usually pretty consistent pow days.”
You can learn a lot about a person based on who they hang out with, and I’d argue that also applies to ski areas. A mountain’s vibe is all about who is frequenting the parking lots, secret stashes and DIY liquor boxes, and it’s safe to say Mt. Bachelor is preserving the purest forms of ski culture. You won’t find any ski-in, ski-out luxury condos slopeside or heated sidewalks leading to fine-dining establishments in a fabricated base village. Instead, you’ll find a parking lot camp scene—both powered and unpowered spots—with license plates from just about every state, pocket bacon and crusty smiles that’ll warm up anyone on the receiving end. And then you drive 20 miles down the road to Bend to find more of the same but a lot more beer. I mean, like, a lot more.
