Greenwood Lake is a summer town that is better in winter.
That is the answer we give when someone asks what there is to do here in February, and it usually gets a skeptical look. So here is the long version.
Start with what winter here is not. It is not a ski destination — there are two hills within half an hour, both good, neither of them Vermont. It is not a town with a winter scene: most of the summer places close, and the ones that stay open are quiet. If you are coming for things to do, summer is the better season and we would tell you so before you booked.
What winter has is the thing summer cannot sell you. Nothing happening, an hour from eight million people. The light goes hard and clear in a way it never manages in August. The far shore reads as a single blue line. There is nobody on the water. Whether that is worth a weekend depends entirely on what you are trying to get away from.
The fireplace is the argument for arriving after dark
Friday, in the dark, in February: get the fire going before you unpack anything. Put something on the stove. Then stop.
There is a specific twenty minutes here, somewhere between the fire catching and the first drink, where the week you came from stops being relevant. We are fairly sure that is the house doing it and not the drive.
The hot tub is better in real cold than it ever is in summer. Sharp air, steam coming off the water in sheets, and a sky doing what the sky does out here once there is no light pollution arguing with it.
Winter trails show you the shape of the land
Leafless hardwood is the underrated part of a Highlands winter. In July the canopy hides everything. In January you can see how the land folds — the ridges, the drainages, the reason the lake sits where it sits. Same trail, completely different walk.
After real snow, Wawayanda and Sterling Forest are both better on snowshoes than in boots. Both are close enough that you can be at a trailhead twenty minutes after leaving the kitchen.
Three rules, all learned the hard way. Go later in the morning, once the ground has softened. Keep the distance modest. Take a headlamp — the light goes early and it goes fast, and a trail you know in daylight is a different trail at half past four.
Two ski hills, neither of them Vermont
Mount Peter is on the Warwick side and has been running since 1936, which makes it one of the oldest continuously operating ski areas in the country. It is a family hill and entirely unintimidating. Every trail is lit for night skiing, and there is a six-hundred-foot tubing lane beside it for anyone who would rather skip the technique altogether.
Mountain Creek in Vernon is the serious one. A thousand and forty feet of vertical, which is the most in the region. Forty-six trails, all but one lit after dark. Thirty lanes of tubing for when the legs finally go. Twenty minutes away.
We would not send you up here for the skiing alone. But deciding over breakfast that you will ski until two and be in the hot tub by three is a particular kind of luxury, and Vermont cannot offer it at all. That is the trade: worse mountain, better day.
When the lake freezes, the lake is the entertainment
In a hard winter the whole thing changes. Skaters come out. So do the ice fishermen, sitting all day over a hole in it for fish they could have caught from a boat in June. From the kitchen window you watch it happening a hundred yards away, which turns out to be enough entertainment for a Saturday morning.
We will not tell you the ice is safe, because nobody responsibly can. Conditions vary enormously along a lake this long and this shallow, and they change week to week. Ask locally, check at a marina, and never take anyone’s word for the thickness under your feet. Ours included.
Short afternoons are for places with a roof
January light is gone by half past four, so the afternoon is the moment to be somewhere indoors.
Warwick is fifteen minutes out and has a handsome Main Street rather than a preserved one — the difference being that people actually shop there. Good for a long lunch and a browse without a plan.
Sugar Loaf Artisan Village is the alternative, about twenty minutes: a cluster of working craft studios that rewards an unhurried hour. Either way you are back before the light goes, which in January is the entire skill.
This is the night the game room earns its keep
The projector and the big screen. The pool table. A long and increasingly unserious game of cards at the felt table, with the bar close enough that nobody has to leave the room.
Winter weekends are when a group actually stays in, rather than talking about staying in and then going out anyway. Nobody will be asking for the wifi password on a Saturday night in February.
Nobody leaves on time in winter
Coffee, the water, the fire once more before it goes out. There is rarely a plan for Sunday and there does not need to be one. The morning light on a frozen lake is worth an hour of doing nothing in particular.
We expect winter visits to run later than anyone planned. It would be the highest compliment the house can be paid.
