With
Sleeping Giant staying closed this winter, I bought a season pass to
Red Lodge Mountain Resort in Montana.
After a solid season (about 30 days), I can say Red Lodge is a nice local hill; like any resort, it has its advantages and disadvantages. If I lived in the town of Red Lodge, with the ski area mere minutes away, it would be a near perfect local mountain.
Its terrain park has a lot of good rails (and a wall ride that was open sporadically), but the big kickers are icy and not maintained or formed very well. The crew does a good job of starting out the season with smaller, easier features and replacing them with larger, more difficult ones as the season progresses, which is what the park crews do at larger resorts.
The day-to-day maintenance of the park, however, was a little lacking. After big snowfalls or sunny spring days, the kickers and landings would get rutted and icy, and it could be several days before they were given any TLC (if the features ever got any at all - often they'd just rope off the wall ride).
The terrain at Red Lodge has something for everyone, cruisers, bumps and steeps, although the trees are packed a little tighter than some of the best Colorado glades and sometimes the snow was so scarce that the groundfall made the best lines sketchy, at best.
The snow was unpredictable. After a good start, the snowfall tapered off before getting about three weeks of huge spring dumps at the end of the season (see the screenshot - yes, that says 80 inches in the past seven days, and that was just one of the three weeks).
I rode the deepest powder I ever have in April on a Monday. Red Lodge was reporting 19 inches, but everywhere on the mountain, the snow was knee-to-hip deep on me. It was even nice, light, fluffy powder, not the wet cement typical of April in the Rockies, but you still had to be careful and stay to pretty steep terrain or risk getting stuck in waist-deep snow and having to posthole your way out. And since it was Monday, my buddy and I had fresh tracks from 9 a.m. all the way until 4 p.m. when they close the lifts.
I only had to wait in lift lines a few times all season (for about 10 minutes), all during the busy holiday season. And I rode mostly on weekends this year.
The ski area has few drawbacks, though.
The main lift is an attached triple, and one of the two high-speed quads on the mountain didn't open until the last three weeks or so of the season after spring storms dumped feet upon feet of fresh powder.
The lift, Palisades, has some great terrain (it reminds me of Northwoods at Vail), but it doesn't get a lot of snow and has limited snowmaking capability. On the bright side, those few weeks this winter were the first time Palisades had turned in three years.
Red Lodge Mountain also requires snowboarders to wear a leash. The staff says it's Montana law, but after hearing someone complain that Bridger Bowl and Big Sky don't require leashes, it's my suspicion that Montana law (like Colorado law) requires something to the effect of "devices to prevent runaway equipment," and Red Lodge interprets that as leashes.
Look, if my bindings come loose from my snowboard, I'm not worried about my equipment (or other skiers or riders), I'm worried about me knees.
One thing I miss about Colorado is being able to gaze at the mountain peaks while riding the chairlift up the hill. Because Red Lodge Resort is on a "front range" mountain, the view off the lifts is of the plains; you only get a glimpse of the Beartooths as you hit the crest of the two peak lifts or from a few vantages at the area's two summits.
But after growing up riding
300 vertical feet of ice, who am I to complain?
Next year, I'll be part of the Sleeping Giant ski patrol and skiing there most of the time, I imagine. Since Ingrid and I both will be working, we'll probably try to get to Jackson Hole or Big Sky for a long weekend, as well. And depending on how Sleeping Giant is, I might just buy a six- or 10-pack for Red Lodge in 2009-10.