Beaver Mountain, UT, Report: All I Want For Christmas is to Ski The Beav

Report from Saturday, December 23, 2023

There’s only one thing better than skiing.

It’s going skiing with friends and family.

We gathered the fam this Christmas weekend and took a trip north from Salt Lake to Beaver Mountain.

The uniquely east-facing mountain is located about 45 minutes away from Logan, Utah, in the Northern Wasatch Mountains—about a 2-2.5 hour drive north of SLC.

It’s quaint, friendly, family-oriented, and lovely.

When we got there around midday, the sun had crept back out from the clouds yet it still was lighting percipitating with frozen drizzle drifting down from the sky.

It was a cold, not windy, and gorgeous day.

Christmas had seemingly come early.

Marge at the eclectic, aging wooden ticket office gave us our tickets with a gleam in her eye.

She seemed like a character.

From there we took the gals to the magic carpet for their first time on skis.

It’s always an honor to be there when a soul finds snow for the first time.

Laughing, yelling, hugging, crying, screaming—a kaleidoscope of emotions is common for your first time.

I reveled in remembering what it was like to be a kid.

It’s easy to forget that we were all one once. 

But that’s what skiing—and especially skiing fast—is good for; to remind you that your inner child is alive and well.

It wasn’t long until we were all feeling like kids again today.

After the girls had their fill, we explored the rest of Beaver which consists of 47 runs and four chairlifts spread across 664 acres of skiable terrain.

We took up Harry’s Dream, ripping some fun trees on a run called Beaver’s Powder, and skiing over to Marge’s Triple.

Was this chair named after the Marge I had met in the lift ticket office earlier this morning? I wondered.

We saw some kiddos hitting the park under the chair so we skied some more trees to the skier’s left of the liftline and cut over to the park where I tried my luck with some rails.

It went ok.

It’s been a long time since my days of ratting in the terrain park.

But we had fun.

We took Marge’s Triple again and on the ride up we looked down and, to our surprise, saw an ermine darting across the slope beneath!

Ermines are small, white, carnivorous mammals belonging to the weasel family.

They are also known as short-tailed weasels and they have a distinctive coat that changes color with the seasons.

They are little elongated balls of pure energy that hop, jump, and tunnel across the snow in the most remarkable fashion, often resembling a fast-moving sine wave in the way they move.

I love ermines. So that made my day.

After spotting that creature we went over to the Beaver Face lift and skied The Ridge at speed.

The snow was firm and we felt alive.

We did that a couple of more times and once I skied the whole thing switch from top to bottom.

Why not?

Last chair sneaked up on us sooner than we wanted it to so we hit one more on Harry’s Dream, carving down D Street to The Stump to wrap up an already good day and make it great.

By now it was freezing and the sun was going down; the idea of pizza and a warm fire started to sound real nice.

We were tired but happy—a telltale sign of a job well done.

What better gift could you ask Santa for than a solid ski day at The Beav with your family?

Snow Numbers

Trail Map

Weather 

Photos