Work has been killing me, and I had the pictures on different machine, so this is the first chance I've had to post this TR. It won't be too long on detail, but I figured it was worth posting something, since these areas are within reasonable driving distance, but don't seem to get a lot of mention around here.

First up was Windham. We bought lift tickets on Liftopia, which saved roughly $20/ticket, as I recall. Oddly, even though these were legit tickets, picked up at the Group Sales desk that morning, they didn't scan correctly all day. More oddly, the liftline attendant doing the scanning didn't see put off by it, and they said "oh, this happens all the time". Weird.

First ride up, there was a still a bit of fog ahead of us, but the place was empty. Good sign.



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Windham has a nice setup, with 2 peaks. Most of the green stuff is on the right-hand side, but so is the most difficult terrain. The left-hand side is a bit newer, but has a really great long cruiser, and a few fun blacks/blues. The day we were there, the blues on that side were skiing like blacks (with signs warning "experts only," etc) thanks to no grooming and pretty scraped-off/icy conditions. That said, we had a blast on those runs, since the signs seemed to scare most people away. In fact, I was a bit surprised that Jana kept wanting to go down those runs, since it was so icy, but she (correctly) pointed out that it will help us ski better, and that we don't get a lot of opportunities to ski icy stuff without tons of other people around..

This is a view of the right-hand side, from the left-hand peak (I think they denote them "east" and "west" but I don't remember for sure... so, looking at the trail map, I'm defining them relative to that). Here's a view of the right-hand side from the left-hand side:



Another note: All of the trails' names begin with "W". It's not nearly as annoying as it sounds.

Here's a view from the top:


This is the blue (pretending to be a black) that we spent a lot of time on. Not exactly crowded:



Looking at the left from the right:



From the top of the right:



There's a nice little brewpub in town, too. Cave Mountain Brewing Company (Cave Mountain is the geological name for the mountain that Ski Windham is on) has good beer, and good-enough food. In an odd turn, the bartender and hostess had been part of our tour group at Ommegang in Cooperstown over the summer (in a group of about 6 people). We recognized them right off, and were struck by the "it's a small world" moment. As an aside, any ski area with a brewpub within 5-10 minutes gets a automatic upgrade to their score.

Day 2 was at Bellayre, a state-run ski area known for being family-friendly. It bore more than a passing resemblance to another state-run ski area. In fact, based on the one time I was at Blue Knob, I thought the lodge was very similar, somehow.

Outside:



Inside:


When we started, the snow seemed to be in good shape, but they only had 2 lifts running. We ran laps until they opened up the stuff (chairs 7 and 8) to looker's right, and then headed over there. There were no crowds to speak of, and conditions were good. It was a little cold, though, and the slow lifts were JUST a little too long to stay "warmed up" from run to run.

Once again, empty slopes ruled the day. We found some fun cruisers that we had virtually to ourselves:



It was cold enough that we didn't take many pictures. We only skied a half-day, and then drove home. We were thinking about stopping for a few runs at Roundtop on the way back, but the night club cards weren't valid until the next day, and it didn't make sense to pay for a ticket when we were only going to make a few laps.

One important piece of info for Bellayre: there's a ski shop on the way up the access road that sells discount tickets. The tickets were $42/full-day, I think, which is almost $20 cheaper than full-price. They were even a dollar or two cheaper than the half-day ticket, which was all we'd planned to buy. So, if you're skiing there, I don't know why you wouldn't go for the discount...

In all, a nice trip. I was a little surprised to find how "big mountainy" the Catskills looked, when I expected something more like the mountains in PA. Then again, I guess I'm often surprised by that (in Maine, Vermont, etc). After skiing places like Liberty so often, the "real" mountains look so much more impressive. I'm sure if I skied in those areas more often, they'd seem less amazing.

Looks like a lot of great snow on that trail at Bell. Surprised the crowds were low for NYs weekend??