23 Oct Our Top Pick for Your Luxury Ski Destination
Winter is fast approaching. It’s time to plan your vacation calendar, unplug and hit the slopes. Whether is is the trails you crave or luxury dining and accommodations our top pick is Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, Wyoming
Jackson Hole is the premier place to ski not only in the United States, but also within the whole of North America. More skiers are finding out that Jackson is the right place for more than just the hucker/powder set. Jackson established a record for its skier visits last year with 563,631, a 12% increase compared with the previous season. Despite that uptick, Jackson has not yet become a place where overly crowded lift lines, outside of the tram on a powder day, should be expected. Consider that Jackson’s record year for visits still only comprises about a third of the visits that the mountains at Breckenridge or Vail see in a year.
Skiers tend to forget that ski resorts are businesses, something that has been made all the more clear during the last several years (see Vail/Park City spat and sale). Jackson, in our estimation, is one of the more responsible stewards of the spirit of skiing. They’ve expanded their operations while staying true to the thread that made the place great before the Four Seasons ever showed up.
To be clear, we love the Four Seasons, especially the Handle Bar. And we also love the guys drinking Ranier tall boys on the snow in front of the Mangy Moose. The mingling of these two dynamics makes Jackson what it is
Staying on the infrastructure topic, we’re more excited for the lift that will come after Teton, for the winter of 2016-2017. Jay Kemmerer, who owns the resort, told us in August that he has plans to install a second gondola that would embark from near the base of the current gondola and follow a path up and further north, touching down near the base of Casper lift. This would alleviate much of the line pressure seen on big mornings at the current gondola, and it would give skiers seeking blue intermediate terrain an easier, swifter journey to the mountain’s main stash of such runs. Anything that gets people up the mountain and out of the fracas at the bottom quicker is good by us.
Jackson continues to produce bumper years of snow during this last decade, with the biggest years coming 2008-2012. It has not at any point seen the kind of drought that has stricken the Sierras during several different years or even much of Colorado in 2011-2012. That could be dumb luck, but historical powder probabilities, which can be seen here, tell us Jackson is a pretty good spot to camp out for a high quality dump.
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