This review comes with a significant caveat: we ar...

This review comes with a significant caveat: we are NOT skiers. I am much more of a faller. This family visit was for tubing only. Our first visit to West Mountain was really a mixed bag. There seems to be a lot of potential there, but they have a ways to go, particularly in terms of personnel and customer service.
The good: The tubing area itself is small, but nice. There are 6 short runs and four longer runs. There are no tandem or family tubes, but you can tether single tubes together to form a "train" on the short runs. The exit areas at the ends of the runs are wide, open and easy to safely transverse before the next tubers come barreling down at you. The "magic carpet" lift is also very convenient and easy to use. My four year old was a bit nervous about both the lift and the runs at first, but quickly fell in love with the entire experience. When we first arrived at just after 10, the lines moved quickly and there was little to no wait for any of the runs. There's also a really nice little fire pit area with Adirondack chairs right outside the lodge where you can relax and warm up. It's almost custom made for selfies.
The bad: As the day went on, the tubing area got ridiculously crowded. They warn you on the website that they can restrict ticket sales if there are too many tubers. With that warning out there, they should absolutely enforce it. By noon, the lines were ridiculous. We ended up waiting in line at the top runs for over 20 minutes for our final ride; quite a time commitment on a two-hour lift ticket. Some children were running amok with absolutely no adult supervision. Some were brazenly cutting the lift line right in front of staff with no consequences. The lodge itself is also bad. The food is REALLY bad, the facilities are bad, and the bathrooms are frat-house levels of disgusting. Parking is also a mess. All the marked-off driving lanes are wide enough for one car, but there is no indication of direction of travel, and I saw a number of cars meeting in the middle of an aisle, requiring one of them to back all the way down to an intersection. Someone injured herself badly enough while we there that an ambulance was required, and it took the EMTs considerable time and effort to navigate to the lodge to begin treatment. It was so crowded that by the time we left that people were just parking on Route 58.
The dangerously irresponsible: Remember the children running amok? There was one particular child who was particularly out of control. There is a small walkway, then a turn on a slight hill walking to the short runs after exiting the lift. This boy jumped into his tube at the top of the walkway, slid down the hill, flattened my four year old, crashed through the retention barrier and luckily settled on to the far left lane as he went down the rest of the way, his parents nowhere in sight. This happened directly in front of the bearded young man monitoring this area. I asked him what he was going to do and he said, "can't do anything now, man. He's gone." Apparently management never trained staff how to use the radios they carry, or the common sense to realize that with only one way up the hill, it'd be pretty easy to stop him. At the bottom of the hill, I relayed the story to the supervisor who was checking lift ticket times. The response was, "Wow, that sucks. What time does your pass say?" Really?
I've heard that this place has come under new management over the past few years and they've pumped a lot of money back into the facility in an effort to rehabilitate a ski center that had really fallen into disrepair. I applaud their efforts and wish them well, but as long as the slopes are the Wild West, I won't be bringing my family back. I'd rather drive a little further and pay a little more for the better quality, customer service, and most importantly, safety of the larger centers slightly north.