After our big ski trip to Keystone last year, we were underwhelmed at the thought of spending this President’s Day skiing in North Carolina’s mountains. We wanted a bigger mountain but a trip out west wasn’t in the cards for this year. We had always heard that Snowshoe WV was the best skiing in the southeast so we decided to check it out.
Compared to the NC ski resorts or even to Winterplace WV, Snowshoe is definitely a step up in ski experiences. The three biggest factors differentiating Snowshoe from its competitors in the southeast are the size of the mountain, the abundance of ski-in ski-out lodging options, and the village.
Snowshoe covers 11,000 acres and is the second highest elevation in West Virginia. There are actually two different ski areas – Snowshoe Basin and Silver Creek – and your lift ticket gives you access to both. The Basin is the main mountain and features 37 trails and 7 lifts, while nearby Silver Creek has 15 trails and offers night skiing. We found plenty to do for three days in the Basin area and never made it to Silver Creek. We were impressed with the variety of trails and the quality of skiing (for southeast skiing). It snowed the day we arrived, which was good because it warmed up a good bit over the long weekend and there was definitely grass and mud peeking through by the end of our trip. But the conditions remained decent and we were able to get some good skiing in.
Snowshoe is unique in that it is an “upside down” or “inverted” ski resort. The base is at the top of the mountain instead of the bottom. This means that the village and all slope-side lodging are at the top of the mountain. We loved the incredible views from our lodge and being able to ski down the slope first thing in the morning instead of waiting in a lift line. On the flip side, it also means that at the end of the day, you finish with a lift ride to the top instead of one last run to the bottom. But once we got used to the timing (and got over our fear that we would get stuck at the bottom!), this was actually a nice way to finish up each day. We found the inverted mountain to be a really unique layout and one that had a lot of unexpected benefits.
One thing lacking from all of the other NC and WV ski resorts we’ve visited is decent ski-in ski-out lodging. There are a handful of places at each of those resorts but the options are so limited that they are really hard to book. Snowshoe has tons of choices with several different lodges lining the top of the mountain and scattered throughout the village. We travelled with another family and rented a three bedroom condo in Mountain Lodge. Although the lodge and its units are comically stuck in the 1980s, the convenient location could not be beat and made the retro vibe worth it. Not only is the lodge slope-side and walking distance to the village, but it also offers such 80s amenities as an indoor plastic skating rink and an arcade!
One of my favorite parts of Snowshoe was the village. Last year, I fell in love with the village at Keystone. It had a quaint charm, adorable shops, and lots of dining options. We hadn’t experienced anything like it in our previous NC or WV skiing trips. So I was thrilled when we walked into the village in Showshoe on our first morning. It had all the charm of its Colorado counterparts. Walking through it in the morning after a nice snowfall, it had a magical feel to it. We loved the convenience of having everything a short 3 minute walk away from our condo. We could grab coffee in the morning or hot chocolate après ski. We picked up pizza for the kids one night so the adults could go out to dinner and even let the teens venture into the village themselves for ice cream.
We rented the boys’ skis on the mountain and were really glad we did. Snowshoe has 4 slope side rental locations, and we were able to walk over to the shop in the village and pick them up on our first morning, which was really convenient. But the real value came the next day when our oldest son’s ski fell off while he was riding up one of the lifts. We watched helplessly as it dropped to the ground in the woods below (and saw it a half dozen more times on future lift rides) and were so thankful that we were on an inverted mountain with the rental place at the top! We got off the lift and walked straight over to the rental shop and they immediately switched him out to a new pair of skis. We have rented off-mountain before but this experience definitely converted us to only on-mountain rentals. We would have wasted hours if we had needed to go back to our condo and drive to a rental shop to get new skis. (And we would have been completely out of luck if we had rented in Charlotte, which we have done before too.) We were extremely thankful that the Snowshoe rental shop had so many convenient locations and that the staff was so helpful and swapped out his skis quickly (and for free!).
All in all we had a really great time at Snowshoe. We definitely agree that it is the best skiing in the southeast. The mountain offers great trails, abundant slope-side lodging options, and an adorable village. The only downsides are distance from Charlotte and cost. At about 6 hours from Charlotte, it is tough to do as a weekend trip without taking an extra day or two off. And we felt like the housing rentals (though plentiful and convenient) were extremely expensive for what they were. The mountain was purchased by the owners of Aspen a few years ago and all associated costs have gone up since then. We rented our extremely dated and small condo in Snowshoe for almost the same price as a lovely, much newer condo in Keystone last year. The resort seems to think it can command Colorado pricing now that it is owned by a Colorado company. I hope that the company will invest in the infrastructure at Snowshoe to bring it more up to date and make it worth the higher prices that they are already charging. But even with the inflated cost, we save time and money by being able to drive to good skiing instead of flying so we will likely visit again when we are looking for a mid-range ski trip.
