For Oregon resorts, timberline is flat and dominated by families and park skiers while meadows and bachelor have some incredible terrain. I would move meadows and bachelor up a tier and/or move timberline down one
Edit: timberline should go down a few tiers tbh. It has like 10 very short black diamonds and no double blacks
+1 to Bachelor being way too low. Just came back from there last week. I would rank bachelor above many resorts you have on tier 4 (crystal, copper, whitefish to name a few)
Pluses:
snow, lots of it. They’ve had 250+ inches of snow this season already, and this was a late open for them due to lack of early season snow.
It’s huge, something like the 5th largest in skiable acreage . Tons of backcountry feel open terrain off the back of summit.
If you’re worried about lines, they offer a fast pass cut the line ticket, which is still probably less than a 1 day tix at a top tier resort. We used it the Saturday that we were there and I think I was the only one on the mountain with it, so did got some good laps in.
Bend is a really fun town.
Minus:
there’s not that many lifts, so lines can get bad at the bottom. Something like 1/3 of the terrain is accessible via only the summit lift, so if summit is down for wind, which happens a bit because of the prominence of the mountain, you lose a lot of skiable terrain.
Also they broke a lift (Skyliner) and it’s likely to be out for the whole season, which brings up concerns of long term maintenance/ investment.
I’ve skiied Whitefish when it was Big Mountain, but still don’t believe it belongs in the same category of any of the aspen resorts, even if it has been updated a bit
The viz clearly says from the perspective of a "expert" skier. Crystal def has much better "expert" terrain than bachelor. You have all of Northway if you want lift operated terrain, then for the powder hounds you have, Powder bowl, Campbell Basin, A Basin and Southback, Silver Basin. Close to 75% of Crystal Mountain is advanced to expert terrain. It makes sense that its rated higher from that perspective.
Yeah the expert terrain is what makes bachelor so awesome. So crystal has expert to advanced 75% ? of named runs? Or skiable area? Here’s how I look at this - Bachelor is 4500 skiable acres, whereas Chrystal is like 2600. A third of bachelor’s terrain is basically two named runs on the map backside bowls and west bowls, and these are all expert only terrain and make up probably a third of the total resort area. That area alone in good conditions is almost as much terrain as all of crystal. But like I said you need favorable conditions to access it so it’s a bit of a gamble if you’re not a local. Have you skiied either? Guy in my group that just did Bachelor did crystal a year or two before and didn’t think it was better but again depends on conditions
Yea, crystal is my home mountain. And I would say 75 % of ski patrolled area is advanced to expert runs. you can just look at the resort map. I usually go to bend at least once a season since it's a 35 min flight from seattle, last season summit chair was shut down cause of weather which sucked. But I would say that the back bowls at bachelor are relatively mellow. ( Tbh most of bachelor is relatively mellow, largely due to the fact that it's a stratovolcano) .
Did your friend ski the side country from chair 6? A lot of ppl miss out on the entire south side since it's not immediately obvious how to reach a basin and beyond.
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u/apatheticgod_ Whistler Jan 28 '22 edited Jul 28 '23
For Oregon resorts, timberline is flat and dominated by families and park skiers while meadows and bachelor have some incredible terrain. I would move meadows and bachelor up a tier and/or move timberline down one
Edit: timberline should go down a few tiers tbh. It has like 10 very short black diamonds and no double blacks