While Maryland contains only one ski resort, there are plenty of mountains for Marylanders to enjoy across state lines. Whitetail, Liberty, and Roundtop attract the largest crowds from Baltimore, DC, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia. Wisp is the heart of Maryland’s second largest tourism industry, Deep Creek Lake. While drawing more from Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania, die-hards trek to Blue Knob while Seven Springs and Hidden Valley offer very family-friendly environments. Canaan Valley and Timberline, while remote, cater to the DC market, as well as smaller Virginia resorts Wintergreen and Massanutten. King of them all size-wise is Snowshoe, nearly 5 hours away from DC in West Virginia.
As an avid skier, I’ve followed the ski industry closely over the last decade; In fact, I cleared the Northern Glades between Bear Paw and Squirrel Cage at Wisp. The past decade and especially the last 5 years have brought changes to skiing, good and bad.
First, ski resorts have shifted focus from recreation to tourism. What do I mean by this? Nearly all improvements made by ski resorts have been to amenities, such as lodges, new hotels, or restaurants, not the ski slope itself. Wisp built an entire village at the base of its mountain and completely redesigned the hotel. Wisp was also the only mountain to add a new non-glade trail this decade, and it was a bunny slope with three magic carpets intended for beginner skiers. Ticket prices have skyrocketed to capture profits from the family that skis one vacation week a year, shifting away from people like me who ski every weekend. This should not be taken as me complaining about prices, I make it much more affordable with summer sales, plus backcountry skiing is free. In fact, this can be seen as a positive: more jobs for locals and skiing brought to a broader audience. However, I fear that this practice could make skiing an exclusive industry that is already expensive enough.
Second, a staggering amount of mid-Atlantic ski resorts were bought and sold this decade, indicating mountains aren’t profitable for small business ventures. Whitetail, Liberty, and Roundtop, which all operate under the same management, changed hands not once but twice in 9 months. First to a Missouri-based company, then to Vail, THE Vail, for $264 million. In 2012, Wisp declared bankruptcy and was auctioned to a West Coast land firm that owns large resorts in New England, which then bought Wintergreen in 2015. Apparently, only nationally renown, billion dollar companies can afford the losses skiing in the mid-Atlantic entails. Blue Knob was sold to private investors in 2017. 7 Springs bought out its primary competitor, Hidden Valley, for $7.5 million in 2013. But the most disturbing and recent case is Timberline.
Timberline and Canaan Valley are literally across the road from each other in rural West Virginia. While Canaan Valley enjoyed a profitable 2018-19 season, Timberline struggled to open runs not because it lacked snow, but because there was no money to operate the chairlifts or snowguns. There wasn’t even money to inspect them for safety, even after one chairlift infamously collapsed a few years ago. Eventually, water and sewage systems for slope-side cabins weren’t maintained, taxes weren’t paid, and Timberline closed for the season in February, a week after Canaan Valley opened 100% of its trails. It filed for bankruptcy and was sold at auction for $2 million in November 2019. It won’t even operate for the 2019-20 season, and hopes renovations to keep the resort up to code are complete in time for 2021.
Third, some mid-Atlantic resorts rely on natural snow that just hasn’t been there the past 5 years. Most resorts have trails that only open with natural snow, because they’re too steep, too remote, or to add to the challenge. Blue Knob and Canaan Valley are primarily made of these trails. Luckily, Whitetail, Liberty, and Roundtop recognize that they don’t receive much natural snow, and have some of the best snowmaking systems to compensate. But Blue Knob and Canaan Valley have only recently bought equipment due to the lack of fresh powder. This is being written on January 3rd. No mountain has more than 11 trails open, and most are only opening on weekends in what is supposed to be prime tourism season. There just isn’t enough snow, or even cold weather to make snow, and there hasn’t been for most of the decade. Recent articles indicate that this could be the future, and the popular magazine Blue Ridge Outdoors predicted that most resorts in the region would have to close in the next 100 years due to the lack of cold weather.
To conclude, there is a surprising amount of competition for skiing in the Mid-Atlantic. But this humble skier wonders how long these resorts can keep up.
Post-Edit: I’m uploading this just as cold weather returns and more trails have opened up. But that doesn’t cover up the fact that for the fourth year in a row, resorts are opening runs up to a month later than where they had been at the start of the decade. I'm interested to see if resorts will have to close sooner than their expected mid-March dates.
This site is super helpful, thank you!