Ahhhhh.... Wildcat... One of the best in the Northeast. My very first adventure on skis was there when my "friends" took me up to the top on the old water-drop shaped gondola and said "See you at the base".... Many, many years ago... I was black and blue all over but bitten by the ski bug....
The scenery is spellbinding. Well, as is most of New England. Learn to say beaahhh and the fact that many folks from the Beantown area will be there and will drink wataah from the bubblaahh. And yes, it gets lots of powdahh :-)
Hey, I resemble those remarks! I grew up in eastern Mass. My first mountain skiing was at Cranmore in 1954. A few years later my friends and I discovered Wildcat and it became our favorite mountain. That was before the interstates existed north of Boston. Stowe was 6 hrs away and wildcat was 4. Cannon was longer. None of the others, attitash, Loon, etc existed yet. Maybe Bretton Woods but that required crossing the White Mountains at some point on bad secondary roads in winter. Sometimes we went to Sunapee NH or Hogback in southern VT, now defunct. We preferred to stay in NH or Maine. VT was New York's ski area while NH and ME were Boston's, with our kind of people who didn't talk funny.
Wildcat gave me a taste for big wild mountains that I still have today. It can be wonderful and it can be, well, wild. It's the place where I first heard the expression, "A foot of snow and 2 feet of wind." They built the first gondola because the old slow chairs of the day would place skiers at serious risk of hypothermia. I can remember a few times when we had to crawl on all fours from the gondola top station to the top of the slope because we couldn't walk upright into the wind on the icy surface. I also remember starting straight down on the steepest pitch when the wind would gust up and I would hang suspended until it subsided enough that I could go downhill. Wildcat faces west, giving magnificent views into the ravines on the east side of the Mt. Washington range. The wind that deposits April snow depths of 75 feet or more in those ravines, also scours Wildcats slopes. Now there is modern snow making and grooming. Wildcat is a great ski experience, but be prepared with a planB if the weather is bad. My favorite plan B is to skin up the Sherburne trail that starts at the AMC lodge in Pinkham Notch. I stop at Hermit Lake where I can get a good look into Tuckerman Ravine and see how it is shaping up for spring. At this point I turn around and ski down the way I came up, 2000 vertical feet. You cannot go above Hermit Lake without being in avalanche terrain, the run outs from Hilman's Highway and the little head wall.
Whatever you do, have fun.
