Greg Hillmann

Review of Mohawk Mountain Ski Area

I have been skiing Mohawk mountain for several yea...

I have been skiing Mohawk mountain for several years and I have always had a good experience, however today was different. My wife reserved rentals for our daughter as well as scheduled her for a snowhawks level 1 lesson. Getting the rentals and getting our daughter situated for her lesson was fine and was pretty well organized given the crowd. During her lesson I stopped by the lesson area to check on her and noticed she kept falling and one ski kept falling off also. After watching for a few more minutes I noticed, from a distance that the binding didn't look right with her boot clipped in. I slipped into the lesson area and asked an instructor if I could check her rental binding. It turned out that one binding wasn't adjusted properly and caused her to easily twist her boot out of the binding. Luckily I knew what I was doing and was able to make a quick adjustment. Unfortunately for her, her binding was like this for at least half the lesson and no one else inside the learning area noticed her binding issue. At the end of her lesson the instructor told my wife she likes to fall, when the problem was their lack to notice a problem with her binding that was causing her to fall. Later in the day my wife showed me a video of our daughter during her lesson where the instructors had her and the other kids sliding down the hill to practice their pizza or snowplough, however rather then catch the kids at the bottom the instructor held out a long pole that more or less close lined our daughter and the other kids. After watching the video I was appalled. I put our son through two seasons of snowhawks and never saw anything like this when he was learning the basics. His instructors were much more attentive and hands on with the kids and in no way did they ever set up a barrier to stop the kids that could hurt them.
I will say though that the conditions were good especially given the lack of snow this year and the staff was friendly. We will continue to ski at Mohawk but I will not be putting our daughter in another lesson there.