Podcast #204: Hunter Mountain VP/GM Trent Poole

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Who

Trent Poole, Vice President and General Manager of Hunter Mountain, New York

Recorded on

March 19, 2025

About Hunter Mountain

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: Vail Resorts

Located in: Hunter, New York

Year founded: 1959

Pass affiliations:

* Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass – unlimited access

* Epic Northeast Value Pass – unlimited access with holiday blackouts

* Epic Northeast Midweek Pass – unlimited access with holiday and midweek blackouts

* Epic Day Pass – All Resorts, 32 Resorts tiers

Closest neighboring ski areas: Windham (:16), Belleayre (:35), Plattekill (:49)

Base elevation: 1,600 feet

Summit elevation: 3,200 feet

Vertical drop: 1,600 feet

Skiable acres: 320

Average annual snowfall: 120 inches

Trail count: 67 (25% beginner, 30% intermediate, 45% advanced)

Lift count: 13 (3 six-packs, 1 high-speed quad, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 2 doubles, 1 platter, 3 carpets)

Why I interviewed him

Ski areas are like political issues. We all feel as though we need to have an opinion on them. This tends to be less a considered position than an adjective. Tariffs are _______. Killington is _______. It’s a bullet to shoot when needed. Most of us aren’t very good shots.

Hunter tends to draw a particularly colorful basket of adjectives: crowded, crazy, frantic, dangerous, icy, frozen, confusing, wild. Hunter, to the weekend visitor, appears to be teetering at all times on the brink of collapse. So many skiers on the lifts, so many skiers in the liftlines, so many skiers on the trails, so many skiers in the parking lots, so many skiers in the lodge pounding shots and pints. Whether Hunter is a ski area with a bar attached or a bar with a ski area attached is debatable. The lodge stretches on and on and up and down in disorienting and disconnected wings, a Winchester Mansion of the mountains, stapled together over eons to foil the alien hordes (New Yorkers). The trails run in a splintered, counterintuitive maze, an impossible puzzle for the uninitiated. Lifts fly all over, 13 total, of all makes and sizes and vintage, but often it feels as though there is only one lift and that lift is the Kaatskill Flyer, an overwhelmed top-to-bottom six-pack that replaced an overwhelmed top-to-bottom high-speed quad on a line that feels as though it would be overwhelmed with a high-speed 85-pack. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of ski area you would expect to find two hours north of a 20-million-person megacity world famous for its blunt, abrasive, and bare-knuckled residents.

That description of Hunter is accurate enough, but incomplete. Yes, skiing there can feel like riding a swinging wrecking ball through a tenement building. And I would probably suggest that as a family activity before I would recommend Hunter on, say, MLK Saturday. But Hunter is also a glorious hunk of ski history, a last-man-standing of the once-skiing-flush Catskills, a nature-bending prototype of a ski mountain built in a place that lacks both consistent natural snow and fall lines to ski on. It may be a corporate cog now, but the Hunter hammered into the mountains over nearly six decades was the dream and domain of the Slutzky family, many of whom still work for the ski area. And Hunter, on a midweek, when all those fast lifts are 10 times more capacity than you need, can