west mountain ski resort

What a misery... My wife and I were away from our kids for the weekend in the Lake George area. We went to West to go tubing (2/28/15). They're supposed to have 4 long runs and 4 shorter kids runs. All 4 kiddie runs were open, but of the 4 adult runs, 2 were closed, 1 was open for kids only, and 1 was open for adults and groups. It was a busy day, and as a result, my wife and I managed 2 runs in 1 hour. After deciding it was pointless to continue, we went down to the main desk to complain and see if any accommodation could be made. There were already others there to complain. The manager did a lot of head nodding and stuck to the no refund policy. She wasn't empowered to do anything, and called her supervisor down, who proceeded to tell us tubing was popular and it was a busy Saturday. When we pointed out that there was effectively 1 run available for about 100 people, he went on about the safety of the other runs. It was clear they were understaffed, but he insisted that wasn't the problem.I get a no refund policy, but when you completely fail to deliver on what's promised...They knew 3 of the 4 runs were closed when they happily took our money. The manager wasn't authorized to comp anything, refund anything, do anything. All she could do was take phone numbers from everyone who was complaining, so that she could get authorization from the owner of the place to offer complimentary passes for another day. Apparently, she was unable to reach the owner while everyone was there, but was going to be magically able to do so once we all left. Unfortunately, a comped ticket would be useless to us, since we were in the area for the weekend and were leaving the next morning. So, we were screwed out of around $40, and West loses future ski business from our family of 5, and anyone else we can steer away from them.

I've been to West Mountain twice now, once 2 years ago and then again in Feb 2015. This place has great potential but I'm afraid it needs new management to get it there. Here are the pros:-not far from Lake George (18 mins by highway)-small mountain so everything is close, slopes are challenging enough, great for intermediate skiers-food is awesomeCons:-small mountain, not great for advanced skiers-food is awesome but most people are not there for the food-their management sucks.. sucks.. and sucks! .. did I say that their management sucks?! they are very good at collecting money and very poor when it comes to servicing complaints.My experiences:First visit - someone went to the hospital b/c they flew over the backstop in the tubing park, no back stop and people were flying over the hill at the bottom and landing on big rocks.. I only found this out after I went over the hill myself on my second run! My daughter was practically traumatized so I asked for a refund after having a doctor check me out .. They have a zero exception policy on this so no refund was given.. I should have called the fire department to report a public safety issue, my bad.Second visit - I made sure the backstop was addressed before tubing a second time.. except this time half the tubing park was closed for 3 hours for grooming (this was advertised nowhere when I purchased my tickets). The guy operating the lifts and the people at the top of the mountain were complaining that the groomer didn't show up in the morning and that they should have done this before the park opened. Well over 100 people lost out on going down the bigger slides as a result - the manager on duty was boasting that this is for everyones safety and that they were erroring on the safe side.. that's a hard argument to fight against if it wasn't for their own employees complaining that he didn't know how to manage the slope (the grooming should have be done before they opened!!)The potential for this place is huge but it's going to take a change in management at least in their hospitality area.. it's such a shame when smaller places like this have alot to offer but they just take full advantage of their customers with no care in the world and there's not much that customers can do once they pay for a ticket.

Things we love about West Mountain:1) Easy parking/close proximity to lodge2) Reasonable ticket prices3) Challenging, uncrowded terrain4) Minimal lift lines5) Beautiful bar/restaurant with double-sided fireplace6) First class grooming and snow-making7) Easy drive/close to homeThe chairlifts need some updating, but this is the only drawback that I can think of. Really, I am surprised to read the other comments about it being a beginner's mountain, because the majority of the terrain is quite steep and not great for true beginners.Overall, West Mountain provides an exceptional skiing experience for our entire family (3 generations).

I bought rental and lift tickets on liftopia.com and I got a great value. This is a small mountain. If you are a beginner or have kids that are new to the sport this place is good. They are a bit disorganized as the rental operation is totally separate from the lift tickets and lessons, but if you want a smoothly run organization with a lot of trails expect to pay a lot more money. If you are looking for value and don't need a ton of trails this is a good place to go. The food was very good at the upstairs restaurant for a ski place.

The East Mountain Ski Resort was a pretty fun ski slope in the local area of Queensbury, NY. I really wanted to go skiing, but decided to do Snow Tubing because of my pregnant wife. We still had a good time for a two hour session. There was certainly a lot of folks there, which caused some level of bottleneck for snow tubing. The staff did a professional good job maintaining the traffic. After our session, we were hungry, but decided not to eat the food there because we wanted a sit down dinner, not pizza type foods. I do enjoy the family friendly environment, and the ski mountain seems geared towards beginners and maybe intermediate skiers. I could be wrong, but we did not see an actual resort where people could sleep in a hotel for the night, as the name of supposedly implied. Regardless, we still enjoyed ourselves. Keep up the great work!

I have been skiing here for years. West has something for the whole family. It's close and convenient to Clifton Park. It's definitely not a big mountain, but everyone can have a great time here. The lodge is big and basic. Very good restaurant and bar upstairs. They could use a ski shop to purchase incidentals that someone always forgets. Over all it's a great place to spend a winter day.

Lame fall festival! Petting zoo was OK but pretending the area is reaching out to the average family is bull. It's all about the owners kids and rich kid racers.

This is the best mountain in a hour range from Clifton Park, although is a beginers mountain. I used to take the kids to WM when we lived in CP - 7 years ago. Nothing change since 2007.

Went tubing with family celebrating a birthday. We had fun, and the children loved it, however, the staff was terrible. They were immature, irresponsible, and not well trained to handle the volume of tubers. Someone let their tube go clowning around at the tube of the conveyor and it banged into me and gave me quite a jolt. The staff didn't even ask me if I was okay or acknowledge what happened, and yes he saw it. One of the females at the top of the slope was dumber than a box of rocks. Very disappointed with this when there are young children tubing. There was an incident on the faster slope where a young person crashed into the snow machine that was stupidly parked near the end of the path and broke their leg. Can see a law suit here for such irresponsibility. The only nice staff was the checkin gal selling the tickets. I would not return here nor recommend. Don't even want to imagine what it was like on the ski slopes.

We happened to be there during Kiddie Slush Cup - so much fun!! We love skiing and totally loved the place.

Although the old, rusty, slow chairlifts scared me, I had a great day of skiing at west mountain. The terrain and grooming were great. There were great intermediate runs with excellent rolling terrain. The black diamonds and some others were closed due to lack of natural snow, but they looked fun and challenging. The lodge was clean and ticket prices were very reasonable. Lift attendants were friendly.

We spent a day tubing while our kids where on winter break. The window/ticket was a issue. We waited in line for 30 mins to get tickets. The actual tubing part was very much fun, though when you get to the larger of the two the line is a lot longer, so if you pay for 2 hrs half of your time is really spent waiting in line to even go down. And they really should do something better (like how Gore Mtn) has for people to get off the tubes instead of just jumping off. But it was fun and kids had a blast. As for the restaurant we ate at afterwards the waiter we had was HORRIBLE!!!! We had to ask where our drinks were, the kids dessert was, etc and I had to wait for napkins, ketchup and mayo for 15 mins. And I feel when you have to ask the host or another waiter for these items that's a issue. The waiter was either new or was more interested in larger tables. Either way he sucked!!

Just had a great day skiing at West Mtn. Everyone was friendly. They offer great discounts to NYSUT members. $5 lunch special...grilled cheese with optional whole wheat bread and delicious organic tomato soup. Trails on the north side don't get groomed which yields some really nice moguls. Minimal lift lines. Skiing was fantastic and everyone was so nice!

My wife and I have been to West Mountain in the past for snow tubing. I expected it to be a little bit busy today with the President Week Holiday. We arrived about 3:15 and wanted to purchase a two hour snow tubing pass for $17 per person. The first problem with West Mountain is they will only sell so many passes to the tubing park at a time and then they close the ticket window. When I say close, they shut the ticket window blinds right in the next person's face. Then there is a sign that says Tubing will reopen in 15 to 20 minutes. But the sign never changes times, so no matter whether its 5 minutes or 30 minutes it will say 15 to 20. So we waited in line to buy tickets for the tubing park for an hour. Then, even though they close at 6:00, they still charge you the full price even though you couldn't buy them until 4:15. Now the actual tubing is very good once you get there. The two large runs are quite fast. However, they only had one guy operating both runs for at least a half hour. This slowed down the waiting line at the top of the hill considerably. Plus, he was rather overweight and appeared winded from working outside for too long. Not sure how often they get breaks. Then, we waited again when some young adult debated whether or not he wanted to go down the hill after standing in the line for 30 minutes. We also waited at the bottom for the lift rope to start up again,for at least 5 minutes when some girl came down the lift path with her dad, only to go right back up again. No clue what that was about. There were also the usual few who decided to cut the lines and the staff appeared untrained in how to deal with them. So in all we did 3 runs from the top hill and 2 from the lower hill in an hour and half. While we were there I overheard the staff say that one employee just walked off the job (quit) during his shift. Another group of people claimed to lose something on the tube and the staff said they had no way to contact the Administration Office even though I saw some of them with walkie-talkies.Also the vending machines inside the building were fully stocked and BOTH out of order! How does that happen? What West Mountain should be doing is selling the tickets to the tubing park online in time-certain windows. Such as from 12:00 to 2:00 and 12:30 to 2:30, etc. This will avoid people having to wait in a closed line at the ticket window and also keep the numbers controlled at the actual park. It will also allow customers to spend money at the restaurant etc. since they won't be wasting an hour in the line. We won't be back until they get their act together.

We had a great time skiing at West Mountain on Saturday. We have never skied there (though my husband did over 20 years ago) and had heard that the Resort was under new management. We were looking for a half day ski for the whole family and didn't want to pay or deal with one of the big resorts. When we got there at 8am the lot was practically empty. We walked up the path and a friendly "greeter" helped direct us where to go. He suggested we get skis first because when you buy your lift ticket the time starts right then. So he saved us some time and money! I saw him helping people all day long. RENTALS. We went to rent skis first and the SportsPage folks who have recently taken over the rental shop did a great job. They were fast and knowledgeable. There were plenty of spaces to store our stuff. They had a lot of nice helmets for sale and a few other things, but the main store is in town, not at the slope. TICKETS: Then we went over and got our 4 hr ski passes. It was $35 for adults and $30 for kids. They have a ticket window for passes, but inside they also have more sales folks and a place to sign up for lessons. LESSONS and OTHER THINGS: I saw several groups of kids doing ski lessons. West Mountain has a little slope with a Magic Carpet lift for the kiddies. They looked like they were doing well. I also saw the Albany Ski Club setting up a race course and we watched some races. The tubing looked great. No one was using the terrain park but it looked like it had some cool jumps. I didn't see any rails or other stuff. On to the slopes--we were excited to ski because of the new foot of snow from the previous day. The groomed trails were amazing and they had un-groomed ones open as well, and all the lifts were open. There were NO LINES and it was like we had our own private mountain to ski on. The ski lifts are REALLY OLD and probably need to be replaced, but they were running fine. When we left a little after noon the place was sort of full. The lift lines were still really short. And this was a big ski weekend with all new snow!Food options: The folks running the cafeteria were really nice and helpful. They were obviously working hard to keep everyone fed and happy. The food was fine--especially the fries and onion rings-- and really cheap compared to most attractions. There is no water fountain, so there is nowhere to fill up water bottles, so we just bought water. They also had free water in little cups if you asked for it. We did not go to the restaurant, but evidently it is also under new management and is good. The bathrooms are brand new and really nice. All in all, we had a great time at West Mountain. From what I hear from the locals the resort has gone through some tough times, but we had really about the best time skiing possible for a reasonable price. I really hope more people go ski at West Mountain and help out a great local institution.