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USA Holiday Accommodation
Ski USA
Book American ski accommodation direct with owners chalet apartment or hotel.
New England Skiing
Connecticut : Maine : Massachusetts : New Hampshire : Vermont : Rhode Island
Colorado Skiing
Utah Skiing
Nevada Skiing
- Michigan Skiing
Wyoming Skiing
New Mexico Skiing
It was snow that first took British skiers to America in large numbers, during the Alpine snow droughts of the late 1980s.
The super-high Rockies had the reputation of getting limitless quantities of super-light snow, and in those crucial years they certainly did better than the Alps.
The reputation went slightly beyond the reality, but in practice it doesn't matter - most American resorts have serious snowmaking facilities anyway.
What's more, they use them - they lay down a base of artificial snow early in the season, rather than using snow-guns to make up for a lack of the real thing. This is partly a reaction to the pattern of natural snowfall. A lot of the Rockies' snow arrives relatively late in the season - something that seems to be increasingly true in the Alps, but not traditionally what we expect. When skiing in January or even February, you may encounter signs saying: 'Caution: Early Season Conditions Apply'. What they mean is that you may occasionally encounter a rock. The state of Utah has staked a claim to the best snow conditions of all by adopting the slogan 'Greatest Snow on Earth'.
The Utah resorts - particularly Snowbird and Alta - get very large amounts of snow, and it is by our standards superbly powdery stuff. But measurements of water content have shown that Colorado gets even lighter snow, justifying its 'Champagne powder' label. California, on the other hand, tends to have much heavier snow, often referred to as 'Sierra Cement'. And New England has a reputation for hard and icy conditions. Piste grooming is taken very seriously - most American resorts set standards that few resorts in the Alps can match. But this doesn't mean that there aren't moguls - far from it.
It's just that you get moguls where the resort says you can expect moguls, and not where you're expecting an easy cruise. American resorts are well organised in lots of other respects, too. Many offer free guided tours of the ski area. Lift queues are short, partly because they are highly disciplined, and spare seats on chair-lifts are religiously filled, with the aid of cheerful, conscientious attendants. Piste maps and boxes of tissues are freely available at the bottom of most lifts.
Mountain 'hosts' are on hand to advise you about the best possible routes to take. Ski school standards are uniformly high - with the added advantage of English being the native language. And facilities for children are impressive too.
Advertise USA holiday accommodation free.
Ski USA
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Advertise USA Ski holiday accommodation free.
Ski Index.
Ski Conditions.
Flights.
