Crowded lift lines. Painful ticket prices. Quickly tracked-out terrain. These are just a few of the bummers awaiting skiers and snowboarders at many a U.S. alpine resort these days. While conscientious COVID-19 restrictions actually offered a brief respite from these issues for a couple years, they are back with a vengeance in 2023.
As an East Coast-based snowboarder, I know them all too well — and they're almost enough to make me hang up my boots. Why can't there be a place, I would daydream, where the powder is more plentiful than people?
Well, guess what: I found it.
After years of listening to my buddy Ed rave about Powder Mountain, I finally made my way out there with him towards the end of 2022. And while December is typically too early to assess a mountain’s quality, I got knee deep enough times in three days to feel compelled to share the charms of this unique set of slopes, which is technically the biggest in North America. But as part of the appeal lies in its still-under-the-radar status, please keep this highly sensitive information to yourself.
With that disclaimer out of the way, here's why Pow Mow is a peach — and what you should bring to make the most of it.
It’s uncrowded — by design
Hit a popular resort on a holiday weekend, particularly on the East Coast, and the crowds just might leave you feeling like you’re in a rat race — the exact thing a ski vacation is supposed to alleviate. Scrambling for parking, throwing elbows in the lodge and standing in line for lifts can really suck out the fun.
Powder Mountain, however, actively limits how many people can be there on a given day. The resort has a season pass cutoff of 3,000 and a day ticket limit of 1,500 — and it only maxes out the latter about 30 percent of the time. That leaves the slopes wide open and lift lines nearly non-existent, giving you space and time to relax and enjoy both the stunning scenery and the rush of schussing down a trail with nothing to worry about but your next turn.
I’ll get to the off-piste experience in a bit, but it’s worth noting Pow Mow is pretty beginner- and intermediate-friendly. There are six lifts and three tow ropes to help you access 154 runs, most of which are rated blue. (Steeper stuff can be found at the aforementioned Snow Basin...alongside bigger crowds.) Only one lift is high-speed, but the mountain’s reps see an upside that would sound like b.s. if it didn't align perfectly with the quality-over-quantity philosophy: slower lifts preserve the snow quality, preventing it from getting chopped up in a stampede of rapidly lapping skis and boards.
It's a mountain worthy of your best gear
Powder boards probably seem a bit superfluous, especially if most of your days on the snow are more corduroy than champagne. But the classic K2 Cool Bean is not only the perfect pow stick, it's pretty damn fun in other conditions. So much so that I once wrote a love letter detailing why I'm kind of obsessed with it. The beauty of a "volume-shifted" board like this one is, it's super easy to keep that big ol' nose up when things get deep, with the bonus of a sweet spray of flakes shooting out the back with every slash.
Not ready to go that route? Nearly every snowboard offers multiple positions for the bindings. If you are hitting a place like Powder on a more traditional ride, I highly recommend moving them waaay back. It's a volume-shifting hack that instantly ups the pleasure of powder — and saves the strain on your back leg.
Of course, you'll need more than just a snowboard to hit the slopes. If you're venturing out to a place as epic as Powder Mountain, it pays to gear up properly, too. Here's a look at some of my favorite equipment, which keeps me warm and safe and riding strong all day long.
“Unconventional lifts” open up the slopes
At this point, you are probably thinking: wait a second, didn’t he say Powder was the biggest resort in North America? How could that possibly be the case with only six lifts, while Park City’s unreal 7,300 skiable acres are accessed by a whopping 42?
Yet it’s true, technically, thanks to what the mountain itself calls “unconventional lifts,” which are even listed on trail maps. The term refers to two snowcats and, no joke, a bus, which combine to reach roughly half of a truly mind-blowing 8,464 skiable acres. The snowcats deliver you to about 3,000 of said acres, but they do cost extra — $25 per ride, on top of a day lift ticket, which starts at $119 — probably why the resort does not trumpet its size as much as it probably could.
(Pro tip: Powder Mountain is on the $369 Indy Pass, which lets you ski for two days at more than 120 resorts across the US, Canada and Japan.)
The bus, meanwhile, is free with your lift ticket. Just cruise over to Powder Country, 1,200 acres of ungroomed backcountry-like terrain within resort boundaries. Shred your way down to a little cat track that leads to a turnaround point in the actual road up to the resort, where the bus makes continuous laps to scoop up powder hounds. This area sadly wasn’t open yet — again, it was December — but sure looked sweet out the window on the way up.
The powder is plentiful — and phenomenal
I feel like I’ve been burying the lead the whole time, because this place is called Powder frickin' Mountain — and even though I visited very early season, damned if it did not live up to its name. Each of my three days there, I was exposed to a bit more — an accidentally well-timed slow reveal of the magic.
The first day, as I was still getting warmed up (slash recovering from a back injury), we did reconnaissance, riding all the open lifts and scoping things out. That was my first look at the treasures Pow Mow’s limited access can deliver. At many resorts, even fresh snowfall is tracked out by the afternoon. Here we found ourselves in plenty of powder pockets off the trails, despite the last big snowfall being a week in the rearview mirror. Hooting and hollering with each fresh line, I felt like a kid again — albeit an alternate reality kid who grew up snowboarding rather than picking it up in his early 20s.
The big news on the mountain was that the next day, they’d be opening up the Paradise chair, pulling back the curtain on terrain that hadn’t been skied since that snowfall and manifesting a mini-powder day. That morning, a crowd of about 50 early-rising skiers and riders nearly plowed over the ski patroller who opened the gate to the lift, but we needn’t have rushed. Even our second and third runs off the Paradise chair were impressively powdery.
The final day, however, provided the best preview of what this place can be mid-season in a good snow year. The resort started running the Lightning Ridge snowcat, and a few dozen folks turned out early Monday morning to catch the first rides. While you can hike or skin to the same powder stashes — and many more I'll have to try on my next visit — the 'cat gets you there in maybe 15 minutes...which is nice, because the process of getting back to that starting spot is a 90-minute, multiple-lift traipse, quite the circuit for a shot at two or three minutes of snow-surfing bliss.
And yet, as seasoned sidecountry and backcountry skiers and riders know, those precious moments are what it’s all about: the elusive, effortless float through deep untouched powder that you’ll never forget. As an East Coaster who makes it out west a couple times a year, I treasure those rare runs, traveling as far as Canada, Alaska, Europe and Japan in search of them. And while our 10-minute hikes beyond the cat drop-off point did not result in the greatest powder I’ve ever seen — Japan still has that distinction on lock — it was easily the best powder I’ve ridden in December.
This little video clip — shot using the excellent Insta360 ONE X2 camera mentioned above — doesn't really do it justice but perhaps it'll give you a sense of what it's like to ease into early-season freshness and revel in some sweet turns before your buddy advises you to go right.
Suffice it to say, it’s already earned a special place in my powder paradise memory banks. Trust me. Or don’t. That'll just leave a bit more fresh pow at this winter wonderland for the rest of us.
It’s surprisingly easy to reach
For skiers and riders — can we just call them sk’riders by now? — one of Utah’s big claims to fame is the swath of world-class resorts so close to the airport, you can fly into Salt Lake City in the morning and be shredding by noon. That's literally true: Snowbird, Alta, Solitude, Park City and Deer Valley can all be reached in 40 minutes or less.
But that hype obscures the fact that places like Snow Basin (45 minutes) and Powder Mountain aren’t that much farther away. Based in the tiny town of Eden, Pow Mow is 56.8 miles north of SLC, about a 70-minute drive. Relatively speaking, that’s off the beaten path, part of what has kept this place off the mainstream radar. But it’s also 20 minutes less than the drive from Denver International Airport to Loveland Ski Area, which is Colorado’s closest major resort to its biggest airport.
The best place to lodge is Ogden, a fun town about a half-hour from the mountain. It’s just under half the size of Salt Lake City, with enough wallet-friendly eateries to keep your belly full. I recommend Slackwater Pub & Pizzeria for creative pies and a huge beer selection and No Manches Way for fantastic birria tacos. But I mean...nobody really goes to Utah for the nightlife anyway, do they?
