Snowshoe Mountain Resort

Snowshoe was carved out of high, remote logging country on Cheat Mountain and opened for its first ski season in the mid-1970s. The founders faced a landscape that ran against the usual ski-resort plan: the flatter, developable ground lay on the summit ridge, and the pitches worth skiing dropped off below it. Rather than fight the mountain, they embraced it, building the parking, lodging, and village at the top and running the lifts downward, so guests arrive at the summit and descend to ski.

That layout gives the village its distinctive feel, a compact walkable core of shops, restaurants, and lodges perched on a windswept crest with weather rolling through. Below the village the terrain fans out across the main Snowshoe basin, the beginner-friendly Silver Creek area, and the steep, expert Western Territory, whose long fall-line runs are among the most demanding lift-served skiing in the region.

West Virginia is not the first place most people picture for reliable snow, but the high Alleghenies are a genuine snow trap. Moisture riding in on prevailing winds gets forced up and over the ridges, cooling and dropping heavy upslope snow along the highest crests. Cheat Mountain and nearby Snowshoe collect some of the deepest natural snowfall anywhere in the eastern United States, often measured in feet across a season.

That elevation and exposure cut two ways. The same lift that brings the powder brings cold, wind, fog, and fast-changing conditions, and summit temperatures run well below the warm valleys just a few thousand feet down. The payoff is a long, dependable winter and a cool, comfortable summer, a rare combination that has made the mountain a year-round draw.

When the snow melts, Snowshoe turns into one of the leading lift-served mountain bike destinations in the East. Riders load bikes onto the lifts and ride the mountain over and over, choosing among smooth, bermed flow trails built for speed and long, rocky, technical descents in the Western Territory that test even seasoned racers. The cool, high air makes for comfortable summer riding well after the lowlands have grown sticky and hot.

The green season is more than bikes. Hiking trails thread the ridges, and the resort sits at the doorstep of the Monongahela National Forest, with its high red spruce forests, bog barrens, and trout streams. Fall paints the surrounding hardwoods in deep color, and the elevation means the leaves often turn earlier and hold longer than in the valleys below.

This high, cool country was ancestral homeland and shared hunting ground of the Shawnee, the Lenape, the Cherokee, and the Haudenosaunee, who moved through the Allegheny highlands long before European settlement. None of those nations is federally recognized in West Virginia today, and their descendant nations continue in other states, but the mountains they knew still rise in spruce and hardwood around the resort.

The Monongahela National Forest that surrounds Snowshoe protects some of the rarest habitat in the central Appalachians, high red spruce stands that once blanketed these ridges before turn-of-the-century logging stripped them, now slowly returning. Black bear, white-tailed deer, wild turkey, and a rich birdlife move through the forest, and the cold headwater streams below the mountain hold native brook trout, the state fish.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.