Want to Avoid Crowds? Try Skiing at Bear Valley
You’ve heard about the skiing at Lake Tahoe or Mammoth, but one of the best ski or snowboard experiences you’ll ever have awaits you at Bear Valley, where the crowds are few, but the thrills are many.
While not on a par with Squaw Valley or Heavenly or other major California ski resorts, the Bear Valley ski area is still a prime candidate for a weekend or even an extended skiing vacation. As we discovered in early February, Bear Valley offers a surprisingly complete ski vacation experience – no frills, to be sure, but still rewarding and well worth the trip deep into the Sierra Nevada range.
If designer clothing stores, zillion-dollar condos, and Hollywood-style glitz are part of your criteria for a ski vacation, this ski area might not be the best choice. If wide-open ski runs, no lift lines and plenty of groomed snow are more important to you, then by all means give Bear Valley a try.
Coming originally from the Pacific Northwest, we could not help but compare Bear Valley to one of our favorite ski areas in Washington state – a place called Mission Ridge in a town named Wenatchee. The population in that part of the state is sparse compared with the big ski areas near Seattle, so Mission Ridge is able to offer wide-open skiing runs most days of the week.
