West Mountain — Attraction in Town of Queensbury

This review comes with a significant caveat: we are NOT skiers. I am much more of a faller. This family visit was for tubing only. Our first visit to West Mountain was really a mixed bag. There seems to be a lot of potential there, but they have a ways to go, particularly in terms of personnel and customer service. The good: The tubing area itself is small, but nice. There are 6 short runs and four longer runs. There are no tandem or family tubes, but you can tether single tubes together to form a "train" on the short runs. The exit areas at the ends of the runs are wide, open and easy to safely transverse before the next tubers come barreling down at you. The "magic carpet" lift is also very convenient and easy to use. My four year old was a bit nervous about both the lift and the runs at first, but quickly fell in love with the entire experience. When we first arrived at just after 10, the lines moved quickly and there was little to no wait for any of the runs. There's also a really nice little fire pit area with Adirondack chairs right outside the lodge where you can relax and warm up. It's almost custom made for selfies. The bad: As the day went on, the tubing area got ridiculously crowded. They warn you on the website that they can restrict ticket sales if there are too many tubers. With that warning out there, they should absolutely enforce it. By noon, the lines were ridiculous. We ended up waiting in line at the top runs for over 20 minutes for our final ride; quite a time commitment on a two-hour lift ticket. Some children were running amok with absolutely no adult supervision. Some were brazenly cutting the lift line right in front of staff with no consequences. The lodge itself is also bad. The food is REALLY bad, the facilities are bad, and the bathrooms are frat-house levels of disgusting. Parking is also a mess. All the marked-off driving lanes are wide enough for one car, but there is no indication of direction of travel, and I saw a number of cars meeting in the middle of an aisle, requiring one of them to back all the way down to an intersection. Someone injured herself badly enough while we there that an ambulance was required, and it took the EMTs considerable time and effort to navigate to the lodge to begin treatment. It was so crowded that by the time we left that people were just parking on Route 58. The dangerously irresponsible: Remember the children running amok? There was one particular child who was particularly out of control. There is a small walkway, then a turn on a slight hill walking to the short runs after exiting the lift. This boy jumped into his tube at the top of the walkway, slid down the hill, flattened my four year old, crashed through the retention barrier and luckily settled on to the far left lane as he went down the rest of the way, his parents nowhere in sight. This happened directly in front of the bearded young man monitoring this area. I asked him what he was going to do and he said, "can't do anything now, man. He's gone." Apparently management never trained staff how to use the radios they carry, or the common sense to realize that with only one way up the hill, it'd be pretty easy to stop him. At the bottom of the hill, I relayed the story to the supervisor who was checking lift ticket times. The response was, "Wow, that sucks. What time does your pass say?" Really? I've heard that this place has come under new management over the past few years and they've pumped a lot of money back into the facility in an effort to rehabilitate a ski center that had really fallen into disrepair. I applaud their efforts and wish them well, but as long as the slopes are the Wild West, I won't be bringing my family back. I'd rather drive a little further and pay a little more for the better quality, customer service, and most importantly, safety of the larger centers...

Let me preface this with the fact that I ski here a few times a week and I absolutely love coming here. However, there are things that really could be easily rectified with better communication and consideration.

First of all, West Mountain primarily caters to racing, which means there are weekends especially where runs are closed to the public and this is not communicated on their Facebook or their website. As a season pass holder, this is a minor annoyance, for someone who is coming out for the day, it should be better communicated. When they close Mach for racing they close Go Go as well which leaves not a lot of options for blues. The racing lift broke a few weeks ago so the racers come down the main mountain on race days in packs which can throw off unsuspecting new skiers (or in my kids' case snowboarders).

They do not update their conditions online or on Facebook. AOA was open for less than a week and is still listed as open even though it only had a few days of natural snow on it. AOA is my favorite run and it gets zero love from West Mountain. Probably because they don't race on it.

On weekdays during the day it's glorious. Everyone is friendly and you can get a lot of runs in. However, late season it gets a little dicey. The mountain is a mess of trash. The other day it was only partially groomed before the re-freeze so you would think you were hitting a softer section but it would be rock hard ice sculptures and a major mess. This same day it would be icy and groomed, weirdly soft (going into Bannister and Inchworm) and then icy ungroom doom, some of these existed in the same run LOL.

The rules are no smoking but these are never enforced. There are people openly smoking cigarettes and other things and if you get stuck a few chairs back, it's going to be a bad ride up. We've had people vaping pot in the line next to our 3 year old. Not cool.

Some days it's all race kids, some days it's all snowboarders, some days it's all locals with season passes. You could hit it on a good day when everyone is friendly and it's all families and everything is open. Or you could hit a day with no grooming and not much open. They do close early a lot. The restaurant is seldom open on off season. There is no "standard" visit here, it could be awesome, or it could be terrible.

They do a lot of fun events, but the recent Slush Cup and sled race could have been organized a bit better, in my opinion. My 2 kids who built their sled themselves were racing against adults who built their sled and had more people on their team. Do I expect my kids to win? Nope, not at all, but maybe they could have had the racing a bit more balanced in age and number of team mates. We've done cardboard boat derby races that were organized that way and we were surprised to see little kids going up against adults. The age floor was 7. I thought I was being fair by not helping them much, but it was an assumption on my part that just made me feel bad for my kids.

What do I propose they do? Simple. Communicate with the public on race days so that they know what runs are going to be open and closed before they make the drive out. Maybe have some options for little kids who are too small for all the events. Maybe a sled parade for kids too young to compete? When I ski and see garbage, I pick it up so nobody trips on it, but i've found some seriously sketchy looking items sticking up from the snow. Maybe have a West Mountain clean up day where you can participate to get a discount on a lift ticket or earn a lift ticket. I love coming here, but it definitely has gone downhill (pun intended) in the past...

I visited West Mountain yesterday to attend the fall festival and enjoy the beautiful scenery. The vendors were lovely, everything was fairly priced, and as always, the mountain looked beautiful. I had taken a trip to the mountain and surrounding area with some friends. This visit meant a lot to me, as it was the first time going since my grandfathers passing. He always took my siblings and I here to ski in the winter, and living so far away I don’t get many chances to go. We attended the festival arriving at around 3:30 pm (we hiked earlier), and bought tickets to the chair lift. We ended up getting some food and got in line for the lift around 4:10/4:15. After waiting for about 40 minutes we boarded the chair and made it to the top at around 5:20. Seeing the signs for the scenic overlook, we decided to check it out. I had never been during fall, so this was new for me. We took some pictures and an employee let us know that the chair lift was closing. After hearing this we immediately left and started speed walking/running toward the lift. About 3 minutes later another employee with a quad passed us on the trail. On his way back he asked if we wanted a ride back to the lift, of course we said yes and thanked him because we were grateful to not have to run. Once we arrived to the lift, we thanked him again, I checked my phone it 5:34, we had spend about 15 minutes on the top, most of which was spent walking to the overlook. We thanked the employee that drove us again, and as our other friends boarded the lift in front of us, the man working the lift stopped my other friend and I saying “let’s be for real for a minute….” He then proceeded to condescendingly scold us, speaking down to us, while saying that he couldn’t go home until everyone had got off the mountain and that the ride we got back to the lift was “courtesy of him.” My smile quickly faded as I said nothing and boarded the chair. At no point were we aware that we were preventing staff from going home. Also not one staff member had advised us that we should head straight back down the chair after getting off, which we would’ve gladly done. I have worked in customer service I understand it’s annoying to stay late, I would never want to do that to someone else. I didn’t appreciate being spoken to like a child that didn’t know the rules. Also as we were going down the chair, hikers were still walking off the mountain and the lift was stopping to let people off. I could see being spoken to like that if we were trying to purposely stay on the mountain, or if no one was left but us, but this wasn’t the case. The whole experience rubbed me the wrong way, and I cried on the ride down. Like I said, this is a special place to me, and it was my first time back after losing a loved one who I shared memories with here. Not that this employee could’ve known that, but I wonder if anyone else had gotten this talking to besides two young girls. I have been annoyed with customers before, but as part of my job I remain civil and complain about them later like a regular person, not give them some power trip speech. Anyway I just wanted to leave this review because of this instance, I don’t want anyone else to be spoken to this way that doesn’t deserve it. All this being said, the usual staff and services here is 10/10, do not let this discourage you from going it’s an...