Winter 2006-2007

RESORT REPORT '07

MOST LUXURIOUS MOUNTAIN: DEER VALLEY

WHY WE LOVE IT> At Deer Valley, a swarm of green-uniformed employees (one for every four guests) greet your car in the heated driveways and carry your skis to the slopes; the on-mountain cafeterias are appointed with silver service, marble cash-register stands and brass-trimmed carving stations; and the mountain is a Mister Rogers neighborhood of ski-in/ski-out timber mansions. While a number of resorts have since emulated this 26-year-old formula, Deer Valley has maintained its white-linen supremacy with constant upgrades to lifts and lodges and fanatical attention to service and cuisine.

SPLIT PERSONALITY> Deer Valley may target the swank set, but it's still in the Wasatch Range, which means 300 annual inches of famed Utah lake-effect snow. And because the resort sells only 6,500 tickets per day, you can always glide right onto the lifts at Deer Valley, even on the busiest winter weekends, when lines at Park City and the Canyons are long. And given the older, more family-oriented clientele, who generally stick to the meticulously-coiffed groomers, you'll often have the steeper chutes, bowls and trees in the Empire Canyon area all to yourself.

CRASH SITES> The Stein Erikson Lodge is Deer Valley's marquee slopeside property, a haute-Nordic affair with stone fireplaces, heavy pine furniture, bedroom-sized closets, Frette linens, and pond-sized jetted bathtubs. and soothing music piped into your room each evening before bed. Then there are the attendants, who usher you in and out of your ski boots and even set up your bindings so you can click in without bending over.

PLENTY SPENDY, TOO:

BEAVER CREEK
Last year's ads for Beaver Creek, Vail's upscale sister resort located just a few miles farther west along the I-70 corridor, featured a snowboarding butler. And while we've never actually seen a tuxedoed manservant out shredding the slopes, the image isn't far off from the resort's level of service. Beaver Creek offers personal shoppers to stock your condo with food and wine, serves free fresh-baked cookies on the slopes every afternoon, provides complimentary ski-check for guests of the mountain, and is deeply committed to grooming the slopes into velvety submission--then emailing the report to your hotel each morning. If that isn't enough, there's even a dog-loan service for canine-deprived snowshoers.

MONT TREMBLANT, QUÉBEC
In the early 90s, the Intrawest Corporation--the juggernaut of American skiing that owns a dozen of North America's most popular resorts--transformed Mont Tremblant from a somnolent, down-at-the-heel ski hill 75 miles north of Montreal into a picturesque destination resort. The base village is now a festive, ersatz-European neighborhood criss-crossed with narrow, cobbled, patisserie-and-bistro-lined passageways and packed with strolling, shopping, dog-walking, French-speaking, and yes, ski-toting humanity. Some might even call it Paris-in-the-Laurentians.

SUN VALLEY, IDAHO
Railroad tycoon Averell Harriman built the world's first chairlift at Sun Valley in 1936 to attract wintertime passengers to the Union Pacific rail lines, and the chic and the moneyed arrived shortly thereafter. Today, the single-seat chairs have given way to detachable quads, the train has been supplanted by a fleet of Hummers, and Ashton Kutcher and John Kerry (who in 2004 burnished his man-of-the-people credentials on the sprawling slopes of Bald Mountain) have replaced the likes of Clark Gable and Gary Cooper. But the resort's rough-it-in-luxury charm remains. For a time warp, book a room at the iconic, four-star Sun Valley Lodge--Ernest Hemingway stayed in room 206.

TOUGHEST LOCALS:
At quaint Castle Mountain, Alberta, a third of the ten-man patrol is named Darrell, the two employees who flip your pancakes and bus your trays in the mountain cafeteria resurface at night to toss your pizza and pour your beer in the slopeside pub, and the wind blows so hard it fills in your tracks before you reach the bottom of the run. But the locals don't mind; hell, half of them don't even wear hats. In fact, they're more likely to complain when the wind isn't howling quite hard enough to redistribute the snow. Make the mistake of commenting on the weather and expect to be mocked: "Are the chairs hitting the tower? Oh, that's just a breeze, eh?"

BIGGEST LINES:
Big-mountain skiers travel the globe searching for continuously steep, huge-exposure runs. But you don't have to go overseas (or out of bounds) to scare yourself silly. In Alaska, Alyeska Resort's North Face is cut by six gargantuan chutes ranging in pitch from 47 to 50 degrees and dropping more than 2000 feet. At B.C.'s Kicking Horse Mountain Resort, a trio of parallel ridges sport 40-degree-plus chutes plunging every-which-way to the valleys below. In the lower 48, it's hard to beat Montana's Big Sky/Moonlight Basin, where you can ski an entire week and still find fresh heart-in-your-throat descents, like the newly lift-accessed North Summit Snowfields and the Headwaters chutes.

BEST BADASS MOUNTAIN:
There's a reason so many pro freeskiers gravitate to Jackson Hole. Actually, there's a lot of reasons: near-vertical couloirs, tight trees, monster headwalls, top-to-bottom-steep fall lines, and an annual average of 459 inches of snow. And that's only the in-bounds terrain. Avalanche conditions permitting, you can yo-yo backcountry features like Granite Canyon, Cody Bowl, and Jensen Canyon all day long. "It will spoil you rotten," says longtime guide Laurie Shepard, "It's 4139 feet of pure anaerobic pleasure." Once gravity has turned your quads to much, head across Teton Pass to nearby Grand Targhee for a gentler shot of deep powder and sylvan solitude.

END