Mad River Glen: Ski it if you can. While most ski resorts would view this intimidating tagline as a marketing disaster, the owners of Mad River Glen wear it like a badge of honor. That’s because Mad River Glen isn’t like most Vermont ski resorts. For starters, it’s owned not by some multinational conglomerate, but by a co-op composed of the very people who ski there. It’s sort of the Green Bay Packers of ski areas, if the football fans were the skiers…well, you get the idea. And the legendary challenging and diverse terrain, including 800 acres of trees, offers some of the best skiing in New England (yes, it’s all skiing; no snowboarding allowed).

At Mad River Glen, they do things the natural way. The original developers followed the innate contours of General Stark Mountain when carving out the trails, most of which remain hidden in the trees when looking up from the base. The northern exposure and bowl shape work together to hold snow on the trails. And that’s a good thing, because Mad River has only two snow guns, which are reserved for the low-elevation, high-traffic trails. Compare that to nearby Sugarbush ski resort, which can cover 68 percent of its terrain with fake snow. But again, the quirky dedication to skiing on almost all-natural snow is a source of pride at Mad River.

But perhaps the most bragging rights at the mountain belong to the Single Chair, the iconic lift that has shuttled people to the top of General Stark since 1948. While almost all other ski areas have upgraded to high-speed quads and gondolas that move thousands of people per hour, Mad River Glen has stuck with the single-rider

Mad River Glen: Ski it if you can. While most ski resorts would view this intimidating tagline as a marketing disaster, the owners of Mad River Glen wear it like a badge of honor. That’s because Mad River Glen isn’t like most Vermont ski resorts. For starters, it’s owned not by some multinational conglomerate, but by a co-op composed of the very people who ski there. It’s sort of the Green Bay Packers of ski areas, if the football fans were the skiers…well, you get the idea. And the legendary challenging and diverse terrain, including 800 acres of trees, offers some of the best skiing in New England (yes, it’s all skiing; no snowboarding allowed).

At Mad River Glen, they do things the natural way. The original developers followed the innate contours of General Stark Mountain when carving out the trails, most of which remain hidden in the trees when looking up from the base. The northern exposure and bowl shape work together to hold snow on the trails. And that’s a good thing, because Mad River has only two snow guns, which are reserved for the low-elevation, high-traffic trails. Compare that to nearby Sugarbush ski resort, which can cover 68 percent of its terrain with fake snow. But again, the quirky dedication to skiing on almost all-natural snow is a source of pride at Mad River.

But perhaps the most bragging rights at the mountain belong to the Single Chair, the iconic lift that has shuttled people to the top of General Stark since 1948. While almost all other ski areas have upgraded to high-speed quads and gondolas that move thousands of people per hour, Mad River Glen has stuck with the single-rider chairlift that takes just 450 people per hour to the top. For one thing, the Single Chair is historically significant; it’s the only remaining single-chair lift in the country that is still operating in its original location. In fact, its one of only two single chairs remaining in all of North America (the other is at Mount Eyak in Cordova, Alaska).

There’s also a practical side to preserving the Single Chair. The logic goes like this: The more people you put on the lift at once, the more people you have skiing down the hill at once. Mad River Glen’s skiers willingly wait in the occasional lift line in exchange for getting the trails nearly to themselves once they get to the top.

If all of this sounds a little hardcore, that’s because it is. It’s not that beginner and intermediate skiers will be left stranded; the mountain’s dotted with green and blue trails. And there are snowshoeing trails and Tubbs rentals for those who don’t want to ski. But Mad River is really for skiing purists. There’s no “something for everyone” mentality here, no fancy base lodge or hotels with hot tubs. At the end of the day, there are just kindred spirits, parched from the bumps and the trees, hanging out in the General Stark Pub, where the Magic Hat Single Chair Ale never stops flowing.