Mt. Ashland Shares Sneak Peek of New Ski Trail

Originally posted on Powder | By Ian Greenwood | Last updated Jun 27, 2025 2:33 PM ET

Progress is being made on a new ski trail, called Bumblebee, at Mt. Ashland Ski Area, Oregon.

The ski area announced earlier this week that phase one of the trail had been completed, writing in a social media post, that it "improves access, eases congestion, and adds more variety to our beginner terrain.”

The new trail will be served by a recent addition to Mt. Ashland’s lift fleet—the Lithia chair. Opened last winter, the chairlift covers easier terrain that, in the past, had been accessible by a Poma surface lift. It marked Mt. Ashland’s first chairlift opening in 35 years and was made possible by a historically large $2 million gift from the Sid & Karen Deboer Foundation and an additional $500,000 from Sid and Karen Deboer.

More improvements are coming to Mt. Ashland in the future. This spring, the ski area announced that it would replace two of its chairlifts: the Ariel and Windsor.

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A post shared by Mt. Ashland Ski Area (@mt_ashland_ski_area)

Both lifts have served skiers for four decades. Due to their age, they’ve become increasingly costly to maintain and less efficient by modern standards.

In upgrading them to newer, fixed-grip three-person models, Mt. Ashland aims to reduce lift lines, as well as improve efficiency and terrain access. The projects are scheduled to begin in spring 2026.

Located in southern Oregon, Mt. Ashland is a small, non-profit ski area popular among the nearby community of Ashland. The ski area first opened to the public in 1964.

Outside of Oregon, other ski areas are updating historic lift infrastructure, including Alpental, Washington, which will open an updated version of its classic Edelweiss chairlift next winter. The lift’s old chairs went up for auction earlier this week, drawing bids that exceeded $2,000.

Those somewhat hefty bids make sense. While contemporary chairlifts eventually become necessary, skiers are a nostalgic bunch. The appeal of a slow two-seater will always remain, even if those chairlifts make crawling up the mountain take a little longer.

We’ll probably say something similar about heated, high-speed chairlifts a few decades from now—by then, who knows? We might be using teleporters to get up the mountain.

This article first appeared on Powder and was syndicated with permission.

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