Podcast #217: Greek Peak NY President Wes Kryger & Mountain Ops VP Ayden Wilber

Who

Wes Kryger, President and Ayden Wilber, Vice President of Mountain Operations at Greek Peak, New York

Recorded on

June 30, 2025

About Greek Peak

Click here for a mountain stats overview

Owned by: John Meier

Located in: Cortland, New York

Year founded: 1957 – opened Jan. 11, 1958

Pass affiliations: Indy Pass, Indy+ Pass – 2 days

Closest neighboring U.S. ski areas: Labrador (:30), Song (:31)

Base elevation: 1,148 feet

Summit elevation: 2,100 feet

Vertical drop: 952 feet

Skiable acres: 300

Average annual snowfall: 120 inches

Trail count: 46 (10 easier, 16 more difficult, 15 most difficult, 5 expert, 4 terrain parks)

Lift count: 8 (1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 3 doubles – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Greek Peak’s lift fleet)

Why I interviewed them

No reason not to just reprint what I wrote about the bump earlier this year:

All anyone wants from a family ski trip is this: not too far, not too crowded, not too expensive, not too steep, not too small, not too Bro-y. Terrain variety and ample grooming and lots of snow, preferably from the sky. Onsite lodging and onsite food that doesn’t taste like it emerged from the ration box of a war that ended 75 years ago. A humane access road and lots of parking. Ordered liftlines and easy ticket pickup and a big lodge to meet up and hang out in. We’re not too picky you see but all that would be ideal.

My standard answer to anyone from NYC making such an inquiry has been “hahaha yeah get on a plane and go out West.” But only if you purchased lift tickets 10 to 16 months in advance of your vacation. Otherwise you could settle a family of four on Mars for less than the cost of a six-day trip to Colorado. But after MLK Weekend, I have a new answer for picky non-picky New Yorkers: just go to Greek Peak.

Though I’d skied here in the past and am well-versed on all ski centers within a six-hour drive of Manhattan, it had not been obvious to me that Greek Peak was so ideally situated for a FamSki. Perhaps because I’d been in Solo Dad tree-skiing mode on previous visits and perhaps because the old trailmap presented the ski area in a vertical fortress motif aligned with its mythological trail-naming scheme:

But here is how we experienced the place on one of the busiest weekends of the year:

1. No lines to pick up tickets. Just these folks standing around in jackets, producing an RFID card from some clandestine pouch and syncing it to the QR code on my phone.

2. Nothing resembling a serious liftline outside of the somewhat chaotic Visions “express” (a carpet-loaded fixed-grip quad). Double and triple chairs, scattered at odd spots and shooting off in all directions, effectively dispersing skiers across a broad multi-faced ridge. The highlight being this double chair originally commissioned by Socrates in 407 B.C.:

3. Best of all: endless, wide-open, uncrowded top-to-bottom true greens – the only sort of run that my entire family can ski both stress-free and together.

Those runs ambled for a thousand vertical feet. The Hope Lake Lodge, complete with waterpark and good restaurant, sits directly across the street. A shuttle runs back and forth all day long. Greek Peak, while deeper inland than many Great Lakes-adjacent ski areas, pulls steady lake-effect, meaning glades everywhere (albeit thinly covered). It snowed almost the entire weekend, sometimes heavily. Greek Peak’s updated t