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Family ski vacations in North Conway, N.H.

BY MARSHALL S. BERDAN | Special to Newsday

January 20, 2008

Family skiing at Cranmore Mountain in North Conway, NH. (Photo by Brooks Dodge)

'So, girls," I asked my twin daughters over breakfast at our motel restaurant earlier this month. "Where should we ski today?"

At most Northeastern ski towns, such a question would be rhetorical. I mean, where else could you go skiing that day if, for example, you were in Stowe or Killington, Vt., or Lake Placid, N.Y.?

But as this inquiry occurred in the town of North Conway, N.H., the response was anything but obvious. That is because with no less than seven downhill resorts within 30 miles of this, the commercial center of the Mount Washington Valley, skiers really do have choices. (If you're willing to travel 50 miles, you can make it to Maine's Sunday River, which, with 131 trails and 668 skiable acres, is larger than any resort in New Hampshire.) Perhaps best of all, that includes the choice to do something else altogether, which is exactly what my daughters ended up choosing that morning, opting instead for the Arctic Blast tubing park at Cranmore, North Conway's original resort, currently celebrating its 70th anniversary.

To be sure, there are quainter and less commercialized ski towns than North Conway. But for those winter sports enthusiasts with varied interests, limited funds, and who prefer to remain flexible to accommodate changing conditions - both internal and external - it's hard to beat North Conway, a realization we first made seven years ago.

Price competition

For starters, there's a true plethora of accommodations: with more than 15,000 beds in the valley, you can select anything from slope-side condos to luxurious or historic country inns to your basic strip motel. Moreover, that plethora means prices truly are competitive (we paid only $70 a night for a family of four at a place with an indoor pool and hot tub, and then saved $7 on lift tickets and $2 on tubing tickets at Cranmore, courtesy of a ski-and-stay package) and you don't need to make reservations months in advance, even over school vacation weeks - a significant benefit if you, like us, prefer to wait and see how snow conditions are shaping up before committing to go.

More than skiing

Then there's après or "in lieu of" ski activities. If it can be done outside in the winter, it's being done somewhere in the vicinity of North Conway - and that includes tubing, snowmobiling, snowshoeing and cross-country skiing (more than 300 kilometers worth), sleigh rides, outdoor skating, mushing and even ice climbing for the insanely adventurous.

But it's the downhill skiing and snowboarding that lure the most visitors to this 19th century resort village, dominated from the north by the looming presence of 6,288-foot Mount Washington, the Northeast's tallest and most impressive prominence. And once lured, they rarely throw the hook, thanks to the wide range of choices (from vertically challenging Wildcat to novice-oriented King Pine) and soft-on-the-budget prices and specials, such as Black Mountain's weekend family of four package for only $99 and Shawnee Peak's $23 night skiing, good from 4 to 10 p.m. - all courtesy of the beauty of all that competition.

Of course, for that competition to be able to yield such beneficial results, there has to be a large enough pool of consumers, and the one persistent complaint against North Conway is that it does pack them in. Traffic can get quite lethargic on Main Street (Route 16) and leaving town on a Sunday evening, when the weekenders head back down to Massachusetts, can be downright vexing. And then there are all those less-than-romantic discount shops and outlet malls (especially the new, 60-store Settlers' Green Outlet Village) even if they are concentrated along the southernmost stretch of "the Strip" (aka Route 16).

No sales tax

Whatever your opinion of what a New England ski town should look like, it's hard to take exception to those bargain prices - and the fact that there is no sales tax in New Hampshire. At the L.L. Bean outlet, I snagged a pair of returned chinos for $12.95 and my wife an overstocked turtleneck sweater for only $6.95. And it only took an hour of the otherwise unclaimed time between arising from the après ski lounge and sitting down to dinner at one of North Conway's remarkably good value family dining establishments. (It's that competition thing again.)

Back in town that evening, we strolled down charming-enough Main Street, stopping in at Zeb's General Store, where we treated the girls to a quarter pound of old-time penny candy (perhaps too many choices this time) and listened to Tom, the talking moose whose real-life brethren have become the town's unofficial icon. Then it was across the street to the free, outdoor public skating rink, where we spent an invigorating half-hour in the floodlit shadow of North Conway's 1874 Beaux Arts train station.

Clearly, this is just the kind of homey, feel-good experience that local businessman Harvey Dow Gibson had in mind when he opened the ski resort originally known as Lookout Mountain in 1937 and brought Nazi refugee Hannes Schneider, head of Austria's national ski school and master of the Arlberg method, two years later to inaugurate this country's first professional ski school. "It's not St. Anton," Schneider is reputed to have remarked to his son upon arriving. "But we're going to love it here."

And so will you, especially when you find yourself asking your sons or daughters each morning, "So, where should we ski today?"

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