Saddleback Mountain

Few resorts on this site have a comeback story as dramatic as Saddleback’s. After passing between several owners, including a stretch marked by disputes over the Appalachian Trail corridor that crosses the property, the mountain went up for sale in 2012 and shut down entirely in 2015. A planned purchase by an Australian company, the Majella Group, fell apart in 2017 and 2018 when that company’s CEO was arrested on fraud charges, leaving Saddleback dark for five full winters. Boston-based Arctaris Impact Fund finally bought the resort in January 2020, and Saddleback reopened to skiers that December, ending one of the longer closures any active American ski area has endured.

The new ownership didn’t just flip the lights back on. Since 2020, Saddleback has replaced its Rangeley Express chairlift, built a new mid-mountain lodge, installed updated snowmaking systems, and added RFID lift ticket scanners, and its first full season back drew more than 70,000 skier visits, a strong return for a mountain that had been closed for half a decade. Down East Magazine has named it Maine’s best ski resort in each of the last several years running.

On the mountain itself, Saddleback drops 563.1 vertical meters from a 1,218.3-meter summit to a 655.2-meter base, spread across 72 runs and 35.85 kilometers of trail. The terrain has real teeth for a New England resort: 10.08 kilometers rate advanced and another 1.28 kilometers expert, together close to a third of the total, while 13.9 kilometers intermediate and 10.6 kilometers easy round out the rest. Five lifts, mostly chairs plus a T-bar, cover that ground.

Geography here produces an odd wrinkle: because Saddleback sits in western Maine near the Quebec border, its closest cities of real size aren’t American at all. Sherbrooke, Quebec sits 119.1 kilometers away, with Sainte-Foy and Lévis, also in Quebec, both around 213 kilometers out, ahead of any comparably sized Maine or New Hampshire city. Air travelers, meanwhile, tend to fly into Augusta State Airport, 90.0 kilometers from the mountain, or the larger Portland International Jetport at 145.2 kilometers.

Beyond lift-served downhill runs, Saddleback permits uphill touring for skiers looking to earn their turns before the lifts open, and it partners with the nearby Rangeley Lakes Trail Center to offer cross-country skiing, fat biking, and snowshoeing across terrain separate from the alpine trail network. The resort’s roughly 600 skiable acres are served from two on-mountain dining venues, The Pub and The Nest, giving visitors options beyond a single main lodge cafeteria. Given the mountain’s history of closures and near-misses, that breadth of investment since the 2020 reopening, in trails, lifts, lodging, and now backcountry-adjacent access, marks a deliberate effort by ownership to build Saddleback into more than just a lift-served day-ski operation.

Saddleback’s roughly 600 skiable acres are served by just 5 lifts, a T-bar and four chairs, across 72 mapped runs, a ratio of better than 14 runs per lift that’s among the higher figures in this dataset and suggests a trail network built for variety rather than sheer lift throughput. Against a 563.1-meter vertical, the resort’s genuinely advanced-leaning terrain, close to a third of mapped distance rated advanced or expert, sits somewhat at odds with its family-oriented marketing, a combination that reflects Maine’s older-school New England ski culture as much as any single owner’s strategy. For a mountain that spent five winters completely dark, rebuilding both the physical lift infrastructure and that terrain reputation simultaneously was no small task.