Four single-session tickets at Wachusett costs around $240. If you ski more than once or twice a year, you buy used skis in the summer, you don't need lessons, and you bring food from home. If only one parent skis, it's under $200 with two kids.

It's not nothing, but it isn't restricted to "rich people", and it doesn't cost $500. If you really love skiing, you buy a season pass, and you save significantly. My point isn't that it's free, or that it isn't a luxury -- it absolutely is -- but rather that it isn't reserved for folks in the 1%. Stuff like Vail buying out our local slopes (ugh, Okemo) sucks, and supporting smaller mountains helps to keep it from becoming something akin to what you see in CO or CA.

It’s not about whether it’s “worth it” - it’s that we live in a part of the country where our ecology depends on snowfall, and we’ve irreversibly changed the climate such that the future for that system will be worse.

Skiing isn’t a rich person’s sport. I grew up in the 80s going with my elementary school, and still spend most winters skiing places like Mad River, where the folks like Vail haven’t changed the place in favor of profits.

Skiing is a New England tradition and cuts across class lines!

There’s almost no snow right now. Wait for the conditions to improve.