I skied a couple of hrs there this morning to satisfy my curiosity. Mad River Glen is a place where you ski the mountain as it is, whatever nature throws at you. Mad River Mountain is a moderate size hill, made into a ski and snowboard park. It is skiing and snowboarding in the middle of a vast snowsports wasteland of brown fields. Considered in this light the management of MRM have done an excellent job. They make a lot of snow, run race programs with coaching and an extensive terrain park. It reminds me very much of 7 Springs on a smaller scale, particularly the north face, but the slope is shorter and the pitch is less. The trails are so wide as to be almost one continuous wide slope. To do this, very few trees have been left. At 7 Springs this means that when it snows with wind (as is usually the case with snow) most of it blows off leaving scoured ice which must be covered with more snowmaking snow which readily packs down into very firm surfaces. It's a treadmill that once entered upon means more snowguns, more grooming, etc, etc, etc. But it does provide snowsport in a place where scant or none would exist otherwise, an entirely different thing than Mad River Glen.

I had fun. Today's conditions were loud powder. It rained hard yesterday and it was groomed too early in the night. It "locked up" after the groomers went home. Still, all of it was groomed and there was just enough edgeability to the frozen corduroy. It skied fast and fun. On my next to last ride a patroller and area ambassador rode up with me. The latter said he had skied there since 1962 and his father had been ski school director for years. They were full of questions and wanted to know where I had learned to telemark like that. I didn't tell them that many in WV and VT are better, I just smiled and accepted the praise. I found the area ambassador again in the cafeteria and gave him a "Mad River Glen - Ski It If You Can" bumper sticker.

I'm glad you got ski Mad River. It's the place my brother taught me to parallel on snowy day off of school. It was the place where my buddies and I skied like mad trying to get ready for Summit County, CO. For the most part it worked as we were able to ski most everything we found out there.

For us Dayton area skiers, Mad River was a big hill offering up a whole 50% more vertical (300) than our local hill Sugarcreek (200 vertical, now closed). Terrain wise what you skied is much more expansive than what was there during the mid to late 1980s. If memory serves me correctly there were only two or three chairs and covered all the terrain between Sundowner and Sugarbush. There was also a rarely used Tbar that ran next to Fourstar Express (which wasn't an express back then). It only went about 2/3 up the hill. Good times.

Lastly, as long as you aren't snobby about it nobody in Ohio is going to get upset w/ you or take offense to you saying you learned to ski somewhere else. Instead they'd probably find it cool and interesting that despite your big mountain experience that you were making turns with them.