 A mere 45 minutes from Boston you"ll find Nashoba Valley, home of skiing and riding seven days and seven nights a week. It has a ski and snowboard instructors corps far beyond what you"d expect to find at such a modest area (about 250 teaching professionals), but it"s a good bet that if you"re from the greater Boston area, you learned how to carve a turn here. Nashoba places so much emphasis on the learning experience that it seems there"s a lesson underway all the time. There are group and private ski and snowboard lessons for kids, teens, and adults; children"s programs, adult programs, snowboard clinics, day and evening lessons, season-long programs; and to cap it all off, race clinics. Nashoba fairly hums with activity, especially at night and on weekends, when visitors are plentiful and the instructors are flat-out. Nine lifts (three triples, a double, and five surface) handle the crowds, dispersing classes or those just playing over 17 trails and a terrain park. With both a modest vertical and pitch there"s nothing that Nashoba"s cadre of instructors can"t get you down, but there is terrain for all abilities. It"s intelligently separated, too. Looking up the hill the intermediate terrain is to the right, the black diamond terrain and the park are to the left, and clustered reassuringly near the bottom are the beginner trails. If someone in your family or group prefers not to take advantage of Nashoba"s many lesson options, there"s a tubing park on-site. Down at the base a spacious lodge with all services also houses ski and snowboard retail shops, the ski and snowboard school, and a well-stocked rental facility, which features season-long rental packages. Upstairs at the lodge you"ll find the Outlook Restaurant with a full service lounge and a nice view of the action outside. With 100% snowmaking and a modern grooming fleet, Nashoba"s snow farmers keep the surface in excellent condition despite the traffic. The tree-lined trails (tall white pines for the most part) give the area a park-like feeling, and a rather comforting aspect - perfect for those just starting out.
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Ski Report
Massachusetts
