Author: By Christina Tree, Globe Correspondent

Date: SUNDAY, January 17, 1999

Page: M6

Section: Travel

STOWE, Vt. -- No longer home to Vermont's biggest ski areas, Stowe and the Mad River Valley are still its premier winter resort areas, offering magnificent mountains, classic village landscapes, and many ways of relaxing, in addition to skiing and snowboarding.

Stowe, a 200-year-old village, is set against the backdrop of Mount Mansfield, which is Vermont's highest mountain and looks the part, with craggy outcroppings and ice-coated dwarf firs clinging to steep cliffs. The village in the valley below has been attracting summer visitors since the 1840s, and in 1921 staged one of the country's first Winter Carnival (coming up again Jan. 27-31).

A couple dozen miles down the spine of the Green Mountains, shadowed by Route 100, the Mad River Valley's three towns -- Warren, Waitsfield, and Fayston -- were sleepy farming and lumbering villages before Mad River Glen opened in winter 1948-'49. The valley's present look and lifestyle has evolved since, shaped by its three ski areas (two merged to form Sugarbush), just as truly as earlier Vermont villages evolved around their greens.

Both Stowe and ``The Valley'' are nationally known for the quality of their skiing; the Front Four trails at Stowe, the Castle Rock runs at Sugarbush, and the ``ski it if you can'' terrain at Mad River Glen attract the most avid skiers. All three areas, however, date from decades in which mountain terrain and natural snowfall -- not water -- dictated where ski areas should be developed.

Only in the '90s has it become painfully clear that natural snow in northern New England is too fickle a base for the big business that skiing has become. Ski operators and skiers alike are not about to invest big bucks unless they can depend on snow, and to make snow you need water. Each of these three long-established ski areas has faced up to this water challenge in its own way.

Mad River Glen has simply ignored it. But then this is the ski mountain that still operates the nation's oldest chairlift (a vintage 1948 single chair to the top of 3,637-foot General Stark Mountain), and in 1995 it became the country's only nonprofit cooperatively owned ski area (1,700 affordable shares are divided among 1,400 shareholders). It is also the only ski area in the East that bans snowboarders, encouraging telemarkers instead.

This year, however, Mad River Glen replaced its workhorse ``Sunnyside Double Chair,'' the first capital improvement there since 1982. Given its size, a 2,037-foot vertical drop and 44 official trails (plus 800 legendary acres of off-piste access), Mad River Glen on a good snow day is New England's best ski buy: $29 for adults weekdays, $36 on weekends.

``We've created a niche for ourselves, and it works,'' says Mad River Glen marketing director Eric Friedman.

Sugarbush, by contrast, from its opening on Christmas Day 1958 -- complete with a gondola and bottom-of-the-lifts village -- has been one of New England's major commercial ski areas. Glen Ellen opened in 1963, and hundreds of young refugees from big cities streamed into The Valley in the '60s and '70s, many opening inns, shops, and restaurants as a similar group had done in Stowe during the two preceding decades.

In 1995, the resolution of the water issue coincided for Sugarbush, which had absorbed Mount Ellen in 1979, with its purchase by Les Otten, owner of Sunday River in Maine. A holding pond necessary to procure the required water from the Mad River at peak flow times was created, and seven new lifts were installed. These include a dramatic, two-mile-long Slide Brook Basin Chair that transports skiers across the semiwilderness area, separating the original Sugarbush trails from those at Sugarbush North (formerly Glen Ellen).

Having skied Sugarbush several times since its transformation, I can attest to the quality and quantity of the lifts and snow.

Skiing at Stowe last week, I was struck, as always, by the sheer bulk and majesty of Mount Mansfield, a wide wall of a mountain that bears an uncanny resemblance to the upturned profile of a rather jowly man. In 1858, an inn was built under the Nose, a project that entailed building a road from the base that still survives as the 3.7-mile Toll Road, about the only ``easy'' trail on this part of the mountain. The '40s Octagon lodge sits not far below the site of the 1850s' hotel. The legendary expert ``Front Four'' trails plunge down the mountain's face, and a half-dozen ``intermediate'' trails snake down its more forgiving slopes.

From the amazingly small, '50s-era base lodge a detachable quad (carry a neck warmer or face mask) hoists skiers 2,000 feet, up to the Octagon. With the notable exception of Starr and Goat, which are too steep to cover or groom, most trails here are coated with man-made as well as natural snow, and conditions were fine. It's an easy traverse from this side of the mountain to the trails served by the gondola up to the Cliff House, from which long, ego-building runs like Perry Merril sweep to the valley floor.

Stowe regulars ski Mount Mansfield in the morning, switching after lunch to south-facing, 3,390-foot high Spruce Peak across the road (accessible by shuttle truck), but lacking snow-making as it does, the Big Spruce double chairlift (vintage 1954) may not be running -- a pity, because it accesses some of the area's best intermediate terrain. Spruce Peak also serves the beginners' slopes and as base for Stowe's exceptional Ski and Snowboarding School.

While names keep changing, Stowe's Mount Mansfield Co. (also known as Stowe Resort Co.) is still the same outfit formed in 1952 from the various small groups that had evolved in the 1930s and 1940s to serve skiers. It's also still owned by the insurance company that originally backed it. The good news is the unusual degree of continuity, but the bad news is a sometimes slow response to the changing demands of this quickly changing industry.

In 1991, the present eight-passenger gondola was installed, many trails were recontoured, and man-made snow increased from 54 percent to 72 percent of Stowe's 490 skiable acres.

The focus on water as Stowe's primary concern has come with Henry Lunde's presidency of the Mount Mansfield Co.

A snow engineer, Lunde had worked for 29 years for Killington, which became New England's largest resort during those years, its success based squarely on its snowmaking wizardry. Lunde was president of SKI Ltd, parent company of Killington and Mount Snow/Haystack, before its purchase in 1996 by the American Ski Co., formed that year by Les Otten, who also acquired his snowmaking savvy at Killington.

Since arriving at Stowe in August 1997, Lunde has been collaborating with business, environmental, and community groups to prepare a $150 million proposal that will be submitted in February to the District Environmental Commission, responsible for administering Vermont's tough Act 250 environmental laws. The proposal includes a $9 million, seven-mile pipeline to the Waterbury Reservoir, to secure four times the water the resort now draws from the Little River. It also proposes a ``hamlet'' at Spruce Peak, replacing the present base lodge with a four-story wood-and-stone version, to be designed, along with a six-story 110-room condo lodge, by Graham Gund's prominent Boston-based architectural firm. Shops, a golf course, a sports center, and more than 500 lodging units are also proposed.

Relations between the ``Mountain Company'' and the village seven miles down the ``Mountain Road'' that connects them have blown hot and cold over the decades, but the resort's current vitality hinges on the close cooperation between the two. The phone number and the Web site for the 65-year-old Stowe Area Association, representing most of the area's 2,200 rooms (accommodating a total of 7,500 visitors on any one night), provide information about all that Stowe offers.

The Stowe Areas Association sits smack in the middle of Stowe Village, which, with its steepled church, venerable Green Mountain Inn, and long-established stores like Shaw's (good for shoelaces as well as parkas) and Lackey's Variety, its specialty shops, and several restaurants, is the area's focal point.

The Mad River Valley, by contrast, is a mix of mountain-backed farmscapes and two small village centers. Sugarbush Resort maintains its own lodging service (featuring the many condo units built near the mountain) while the Sugarbush Chamber of Commerce represents the Valley's scattered inns and lodges. While 6,600 visitors can bed down on any one night in the Valley, it's far from obvious where.

The big lodging news in the Mad River Valley this season was to be the American Ski Co.'s slopeside Grand Lodge at Sugarbush, but local opposition has postponed (also downsized and upscaled) the project, and the big splash remains the 11-room Pitcher Inn in the middle of Warren Village, now in its first full winter season. From the outside, you barely notice this white clapboard building, designed by local architect David Sellers as a replacement for a 19th-century inn that burned several years ago.

Inside, however, the Pitcher Inn offers some extraordinary spaces, notably the dining room and the guest rooms, each designed by a different architect to convey a different aspect of local history. The ``Lodge,'' for instance, replicates a Masonic Lodge with its obelisk-shaped bedposts and midnight blue ceiling studded with stars. From a bedside switch in the Mountain Room, the sun rises or sets over the mountain mural on the facing wall. Bathrooms are splendid.

By the same token, the exterior of the Warren Store across the road belies the gourmet foods, fine wines, deli, and freshly baked baguettes sold inside, not to mention one of the most sophisticated boutiques in Vermont upstairs.

Like Stowe, lodging in the Mad River Valley runs the gambit from funky to fabulous and includes many exceptional small inns and lodges.

Both areas are also known for the quality of their restaurants and for the variety of nonskiing outdoor options like sleigh rides and snowshoeing.

Stowe, home of Tubbs Snowshoes, now offers designated snowshoeing trails as well as rentals at three of its four cross-country ski centers, which, incidentally, offer 150 kilometers of interconnected trails, the largest cross-country network in the East.

Stowe also offers a new snowmobiling option: a guided tour through Smugglers' Notch, the high pass over a shoulder of Mount Mansfield , otherwise closed to motor traffic all winter. The Mad River Valley, on the other hand, is home to Vermont Icelandic Horse Farm, with horseback riding across snowy fields.

Both Stowe and the Mad River Valley also offer plenty of indoor distractions, ranging from movie houses and art galleries to sports centers and including a choice of apres ski options. Winter Carnival in the Mad River Valley is set for Jan. 29-Feb. 9, and Mad River Glen's 50th Anniversary Gala is Jan. 23 -- 1949 lift prices of 3.50 will be charged Jan. 26.

For the Stowe Mountain Resort, phone 800-253-4754 or visit www.stowe.com.

The Sugarbush Chamber of Commerce offers lodging reservations (800-82-VISIT) and other information (802-496-3409), and also maintains a helpful Web site with links to lodging, dining, and more: www.sugarbushchamber.org.

The chamber's new walk-in center in the General Wait House in Waitsfield is open weekdays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. For lodging reservations through Sugarbush Resort, phone 800-53SUGAR; the Web site: www.sugarbush.com.

Mad River Glen: Call 802-496-3551 or visit the standout Web site: www.madriverglen.com.

Stowe: According to Stowe Area Association director Tom Kaiden, Stowe offers 550 rooms in resorts, 625 in country inns and bed-and-breakfasts, 225 motel units, and roughly 350 condo units. Its two family-owned, family-geared resorts, the 89-unit Golden Eagle (800-626-1010) and Snowflake Mountain Resort & Spa (95 rooms and 25 townhouses) began as motels.

The landmark Green Mountain Inn (800-253-7302), first opened in 1833, is a full-facility resort with 72 rooms, many of them fabulous, in the middle of Stowe Village. The 93-room Trapp Family Lodge (800-826-7000), meanwhile, is sited on in its own quiet shoulder of the mountain. Both form yet another special class.

Among Stowe's many country inns and B & Bs, my favorites include the Gables (800-GABLES-1), known for its warm atmosphere and great breakfasts. The same goes for the smaller Fiddler's Green Inn (800-882-5346) and Ski Inn, the area's oldest and most traditional lodge where rooms, including dinner and breakfast, are $110-$135 per couple, from $55 single. Reasonably priced accommodations in the vintage 1936 Inn at Turner Mill (800-992-0016) are geared to cross-country skiers. Stowe Mountain Resort's Inn at The Mountain and Condominiums (800-253-4754) offers luxurious lodging that's the closest to the lifts.

Mad River Valley: According to Sugarbush Resort, 2,200 of the Valley's 6,600 beds are condominiums, inns, and resorts at the top of the access road.

Sugarbush Village Condominiums (800-451-4326) sleep two to 10 and offer some good deals. Also nearby: the self-contained condo-style, family-geared Bridges Resort and Racquet Club (800-453-2922) and attractive B & Bs like West Hill House (802-496-7162) and Hamilton House (802-583-1066). Nearer Sugarbush North and Mad River Glen, Millbrook Inn (800-477-2809) is celebrating it 20th season under the hospitable ownership of Thom and Joan Gorman. The Inn at Round Barn Farm (802-496-2276) offers luxurious rooms and baths, a lap pool in the bottom of its barn, and great views across the fields webbed with cross-country trails. Betsy Pratt, past mistress of River Glen (also responsible for its present unusual status), still runs the Inn at Mad River Barn, a classic '40s ski lodge that's one of the best values in the valley. Rooms at the Pitcher Inn are $200-$425.

In Stowe Village, Blue Moon Cafe (802-253- 7006) is small, expensive, and the current toast of the town,featuring Vermont game and produce. The informal Gracie's Restaurant (802-253-8741) is known for its quality burgers, all named for dogs (Gracie was the owners' pooch). At opposite extremes: The Cliff House (802-253-3000), 3,700 feet up on Mount Mansfield, offers fine dining and the best view around. A price of $42 includes the gondola ride as well as a full-course meal.

Mad River Valley: At The Pitcher Inn (802-496-3831), Louisiana-native Tom Bevins is recognized as one of Vermont's top chefs. Entrees (I recommend the grilled duck breast with pinot noir sauce) run $20-$27. Moderately priced Bass Restaurant (802-583-3100) offers American cuisine with the distinctive Greek and African accents of its owners (try the slow roast lamb shank served with bean cakes and finished with mint). The brand new ``in'' spot is the Spotted Cow (802-496-5151), small, stylish, and owned by Bermuda-bred Jay Young (great Bermudian fish chowder!) The Millbrook Inn has a small but dependably good dining room. American Flatbread (802-496-9800) is not to be missed, and The Den (802-496-8880) is the real heart of Waitsfield: great soups as well as burgers and microbrews.