Now, just in time for the 2026-2027 winter season, DCSki has received the most ambitious upgrade in its history.
Virtually every section of the site has received attention, from the pages readers interact with to the behind-the-scenes infrastructure that keeps DCSki running. Some changes are immediately obvious. Others are more subtle. Together, they represent months of work and tens of thousands of lines of new and updated code.
Here’s a tour of what’s new.
Note: Some features described below require a DCSki account and being logged in. If you don’t already have an account, you can register for free.
A New Home for DCSki
The most visible change is DCSki’s redesigned home page. The new adaptive layout is designed to work equally well on a phone, tablet, laptop, or large desktop display, while providing more ways to discover what’s happening throughout DCSki.
Recent DCSki stories remain front and center, but they now share the page with several new features.
The Forum has a much more prominent presence. Instead of simply presenting a list of recent topics, DCSki provides short narrative summaries that explain what each active discussion is about. That makes it possible to quickly scan what the community is talking about and decide which conversations you’d like to join.
Weather also has a new home on the front page. The Mid-Atlantic Skiers’ Forecast is specifically focused on weather developments relevant to skiers and snowboarders across DCSki’s coverage area. Alongside the forecast is a Weather Fact of the Day, offering a bite-sized look at weather science, forecasting, or mountain meteorology.
There’s also a Ski History Fact of the Day, digging into an interesting chapter from the long history of skiing — from resorts and lifts to equipment, snowmaking, and other innovations that shaped the sport.
A new Elsewhere on the Web section expands the view beyond DCSki, highlighting interesting ski-related stories recently published around the country and world.
The home page also reaches deeper into DCSki’s own archives, periodically surfacing interesting Lost Ski Areas, interviews, and other content that might otherwise be easy to miss.
Your DCSki Dashboard
Registered users will find one of the largest collections of new features under Your DCSki Dashboard, which can be reached directly from the home page while logged in.
The Dashboard brings together many of the ways you interact with DCSki. You can exchange private messages with other members, manage saved stories and favorite resorts, review your Forum activity, and control information displayed on your public DCSki profile.
There’s also an entirely new Ski Diary. It lets you record days spent skiing or snowboarding, including where you went and notes about the day. Over time, it becomes a personal skiing history — or, perhaps, a ski bibliography — that you can share with other DCSki members.
A new photo gallery collects recent images you’ve uploaded to DCSki. Members who support DCSki with a donation receive additional benefits, including an ad-free DCSki experience for 12 months and access to their complete gallery of previously uploaded images. The Dashboard provides a convenient place to see and track those benefits.
Rediscover 30 Years of Stories
DCSki has been publishing stories since the 1990s, creating an archive that chronicles three decades of Mid-Atlantic skiing. The redesigned Newsroom makes that history considerably easier to explore.
Readers can browse, search, and filter DCSki’s archive to find stories from years past. And if you have no idea what you’re looking for, there’s a new option: Surprise Me.
Give it a click and DCSki will send you to an interesting story from the archives.
Logged-in readers will also notice a Save Story option on articles. See something you want to return to later? Save it, and it will be waiting in your Dashboard along with everything else you’ve bookmarked.
A Better Way to Explore Mid-Atlantic Ski Resorts
DCSki’s Resorts section has been rebuilt around a new way of exploring the region.
DCSki maintains an extensive collection of independent Resort Profiles covering ski areas throughout the Mid-Atlantic. The redesigned Resort explorer lets you narrow those choices using characteristics such as mountain size, trail count, and specific resort strengths and features.
Individual Resort Profile pages have also received a major redesign. Facts, statistics, descriptions, maps, related DCSki coverage, and other useful information are organized to make researching a ski area easier.
Logged-in users can Favorite individual resorts, creating a personalized collection of the mountains they care about most.
This work will continue into the fall. In the coming weeks, DCSki’s Resort Profiles will be systematically reviewed and updated with the latest information for the 2026-2027 winter season.
A New Forum for the DCSki Community
The DCSki Forum has been part of the site for decades, and the new version retains that history while giving discussions a much cleaner, more modern interface.
One new feature is Lonely Topics, which provides a quick way to find discussions that haven’t received a reply. Maybe you know the answer. Maybe you have an opinion. Or maybe somebody just needs a little company.
DCSki now also creates narrative summaries of Forum discussions. Rather than judging a thread solely from its title, you can quickly see what people are discussing before jumping into the conversation. Those summaries continue to evolve as new replies are posted.
Other improvements throughout the Forum make it easier to follow discussions, keep track of unread activity, subscribe to topics, send private messages, and interact with other members.
Bringing Lost Ski Areas Back to Life
DCSki’s Lost Ski Areas project has also been extensively re-engineered.
The collection has now grown to 127 former ski areas, preserving the histories of mountains that have disappeared from the Mid-Atlantic ski landscape.
A new interactive map shows the approximate locations of these lost areas, providing a fascinating visualization of just how many ski hills once dotted the region.
Individual Lost Ski Area profiles now begin with narrative summaries that bring together DCSki’s research with the memories, corrections, photographs, and stories readers have contributed over the years. That community knowledge is especially valuable: in many cases, very little documentation of these ski areas survives elsewhere.
The underlying profiles have also been redesigned to make historical information, photographs, maps, and reader comments easier to explore.
Still to Come: The DCSki Dispatch
The new site provides a foundation for additional features that will arrive over time.
One already under development is The DCSki Dispatch, a personalized weekly newsletter for registered DCSki members.
The Dispatch will provide an ad-free summary of DCSki content tailored to each reader, including recent stories and interesting Forum activity, delivered by e-mail each Sunday morning.
More details will come as the Dispatch gets closer to launch.
Take a Look Around
A site with more than 30 years of history doesn’t get rebuilt overnight. DCSki’s new design represents months of work, but it also builds on decades of stories, discussions, photographs, historical research, and contributions from the DCSki community.
There will undoubtedly be additional refinements as the new site settles in and the 2026-2027 season approaches.
So take a look around. Visit the Forum. Dig through the Newsroom. Find a ski area you’ve never visited. Explore a lost mountain. Save an old story. Start a Ski Diary.
And if you find something that doesn’t seem quite right, please let me know - you can post in the Forum or comment below.
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