North Carolina’s Sugar Mountain tops out at 5,300 feet and has a total vertical drop of 1,200 vertical feet, one of the longest cumulative drops of any resort in the Southeast. But vertical drop alone doesn’t belie a slope’s steepness. For that, you have to look at the slope’s actual grade or pitch. That’s where Sugar shines, with three black diamond runs beginning a mile high in elevation with pitches greater than 40 percent. Both Boulderdash and Whoopdedoo have the steepest stretches of skiable terrain on the mountain with pitches that max out at 48 percent, and Tom Terrific comes in a close second with a 45 percent stretch.

To put this in perspective, at most Western resorts, slopes are given black diamond status when they begin to tip 40 percent in grade, which puts all three of Sugar’s expert-only slopes squarely in legitimate black diamond territory. The slopes are so steep, Sugar has to hook their snow cats up to winches in order to groom the most vertical pitches.

“Boulderdash and Whoopdedoo are both straight fall line slopes,” says Kim Jochl, a former member of the U.S. Alpine Ski Team who now runs the marketing program at Sugar. “They don’t curve around the mountain, they go straight down it.”

...the Gnat possessed outstanding performance features including a 10,000 foot-per-minute climb rate, and a roll rate in excess of 360 degrees per second.

A graduate of the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music in New York