Skiing With Your Family travel tips and stories. Vacations ideas, cruises, spa and resorts

About 50 miles north of Manhattan in the Hudson River Valley, is located the Mount Peter Ski Area and seventy-three years later, Mount Peter, welcomes about 50,000 visitors a year, with a regular clientele from as far away as Long Island. The resort has been there a long time and struggled financially many years, but it never closed. The strange is how this small, mostly family-run ski area remains to the soul, spirit and financial future of the sport.

Such resorts are affordable places of outdoor recreation and prized winter playgrounds where countless children are introduced to skiing or snowboarding. However a small ski area like Mount Peter offers kids freedom. They can take a run on their own, and they can come play in the snow. There’s a freedom for the parents, too.

But in a region where Mount Peter sits, there are snowless winters. At least the owners installed snow guns. The snow making is just a means to an end, a way to get people skiing. People who learned to ski at Mount Peter in the 1960s and ’70s now had children, and when it came time for them to learn to ski or snowboard, they were drawn to the small-mountain environment they remembered.

Photos by: Aaron Houston