UNIQUE EXPERIENCES AT MODEST RESORTS
Small Maine mountains offer up huge savings
JAY, MAIN E Skiing Spruce Mountain in Jay is about as different from skiing at a big-name resort as you can get.
The mountain — about a threehour drive north of Boston — boasts being “home of the $1 grilled cheese sandwich,” and a single tow rope hoists skiers up the modest but neatly groomed hill. At times on a visit there, I had the entire place to myself, meaning no lines and plenty of runs for the $18 I had plunked down for a daylong ticket.
Because I had had my fill by noon, I returned to the volunteer-run area’s lodge. The manager, noticing my early return, insisted I take $8 back. How many ski areas anywhere give you a refund?
But if you aren’t hung up on big resort names and can draw satisfaction from schussing down trails only a fraction as long as those at the big mountains, skiing on the cheap can be easily done at these types of smaller, lesser-known places. Especially in Maine, which has some big resorts like Sunday River and Sugarloaf, but is also scattered with small, family- or club-owned ski hills. At these smaller ski areas, a day’s lift ticket might amount to $10 or $20 — that compares to the $80-a-day or so a larger resort will charge. And a season’s pass costs what you’d pay for a couple of days at a large resort.
You don’t necessarily have to be frugal to be among those who relish a day at those off-the radar, out-ofthe way spots where it seems everyone has a smile and no one is out to set a ski-fashion trend. At least in Maine, small ski areas are a kind of a tradition going back to the days of wooden skis and rope tows.
In the town of Lee, about an hour’s drive northeast of Bangor, Maine, what came to be known as Mount Jefferson has been in Byron Delano’s family since Delano’s father and five other men developed the trails a half-century ago.
To warm up between runs down the trails featuring a 132-metre vertical drop, skiers sip 25-cent cups of coffee and gobble up the locally acclaimed doughnuts made by Delano’s 88-year-old mother.
Baker Mountain in the town of Moscow is a $10-per-day gem that charges a whole buck-and-a-half for a grilled cheese sandwich.
At Southern Maine’s Powderhouse Hill, an old Ford V-8 engine mounted in the back of a pickup truck powers an 244-metre tow rope up the trail in what’s among America’s smallest ski areas. Lift tickets are $5 at the South Berwick town-owned area.