When choosing a destination for our ski weekend, one of the things that appealed to me about Winterplace, WV was the fact that it also offered snow tubing. Our oldest had been skiing before and loved it, but it was our youngest son’s first time and we weren’t sure he would be as enamored with it. I liked having snow tubing as an option for the second day in case he didn’t like or if anyone just wanted to do something different.
After some early frustrations, my youngest did really enjoy skiing. But even so, by lunch time on the second day he was ready for a change of pace. He had gotten a peek at the snow tubing runs from the top of lift 4 and thought it looked like so much fun (and less work than skiing!). After some discussion of splitting up, all 4 of the kids decided they wanted to tube for the rest of the afternoon – a decision they would not regret. After having lunch in the lodge, we turned in our ski rentals and drove up to the MountainHouse.
Located mid-mountain, the MountainHouse offers food and drinks and is where you purchase snow tubing tickets. We were excited to find that Winterplace offers an add-on snow tubing ticket if you have already purchased a lift ticket for the day. For only $18, you can purchase a 2 hour snow tubing pass for the same day as your lift ticket. (A regular snow tubing ticket costs $25 on weekdays and $35 on weekends.)
What we hadn’t realized before we headed up there was that the 2 hour passes were for pre-defined 2 hour blocks and were not a rolling 2 hours from whenever you bought the tickets. We got there about 30 minutes into the new time block and had decide if we wanted to wait an hour and a half until the next one started or just take a shorter amount of time. Since we had already eaten, we decided to just join the current window and have a shorter time to tube.
The snow tubing hill has 2 Super Carpet Lifts and 10 tubing lanes. You simply have to grab a tube from the pile at the base of the hill, ride the carpet lift to the top, pick a lane, and push off.
And it was exactly as much fun as it looked like it would be. We all had such a blast. And I can tell you from personal experience that adults will absolutely fly down those hills (due to their, ahem, greater density). None of the kids could beat me! (Just make sure you keep your feet in so you don’t clip the snow built up on the side of the lane as you go down. Going down at such a high speed, it really hurts!)
We spent the full hour and a half left in our time slot going up and down the hill as many times as we could. The kids had races and tested out different lanes and different tubes to figure out the fastest combinations. They had an absolute blast. I was so glad that we decided to do this instead of skiing for the rest of the afternoon. Skiing is a lot of fun but is definitely tiring and sometimes frustrating. Snow tubing was such an easy, fun and carefree way to end our weekend. I highly recommend it for kids and adults alike!
