I feel like at many resorts that we drive up to I sit in the back of my SUV with the back latch door up and put boots on behind the truck. Been doing it this way for decades. It's nice when you bring in a bag and do it inside in a heated locker area, especially with kids or for the wife, but that's only an amenity and not a necessity.
As long as there's a place to buy a beer in the afternoon and/or after skiing I'm happy.
This is how my wife and I generally run things on a day trip... keep away from the mess of kids, bags, and spilled food in the lodge and do our booting up in the car almost always. Our usual MO is that we pack our own lunch, and stop somewhere for a beer and dinner near the hill as we're leaving. Warm days we'll eat lunch at the car, colder days we'll eat it inside and and buy some soup or coffee to have something warmer... if lodges stay closed, I don't think it will deter us from shorter trips or longer trips on warmer days, but I don't think we'll be making the longer drives to Spirit or Granite on colder days knowing that we don't have the option to go inside for a cup of chili.
I totally get that skiing with young kids is a completely different game. Our toddler isn't quite there yet, next year will be her first year. I couldn't imagine taking her out without a lodge to warm up in.
Places like Trollhaugen can be a total PITA to get to your car and now they want you to do that with your ski boots on? I think lots of families will wait and ski later this year once things reopen somewhat.
Totally agree, Trollhaugen is the one place that comes to mind as being a real pain to boot up at the car. The metal stairs to get down to the hill are awful in boots while carrying skis, and I feel like significant parts of their parking lot just don't drain properly and there's almost always a lot ice or mud to walk across, depending on the temperature.
--
We ended up getting the Indy+ pass this year, so that we would have the option to ski Lutsen and Granite on weekends. We figured that with their partial credit program if you don't use it this year, worse case we really wouldn't be out a whole lot of money. We did one day at Troll last week of October, just to say we had skied in October since neither of us had done it before, but otherwise we've been waiting until places get more runs opened up.
We will see, if lodges are closed through peak season, maybe there will be issues, but I'm betting on this being a really big season. If any of the massive increase in interest and participation in camping, hiking, canoeing, biking, etc. that happened this year carries over, it's going to be pretty busy. A friend of ours is a maintenance supervisor for Three Rivers Park District (Hennepin County parks), and they had a tent sale for last year's Nordic rental equipment, with pre-registration required. The entire registration system was completely booked within 20 mins of registration opening. Seems pretty wild to me to have that level of interest in a park district sale of used Nordic equipment. I wonder if anyone has any data or anecdotes on season pass sales or equipment/tune-up sales at ski shops this fall that could give us a preview of the level of interest this year?
