A nifty, trifty ski trip

COPPER MOUNTAIN, Colo. -- On our first morning at Copper Mountain Resort, I watched as my 8-year-old son cut his first tracks through the powder on Vein Glory, a beginner slope below the High Point chair.

"I live for this!" he shouted as he bombed down the hill in a "pizza" stance, rarely bothering to turn.

Priceless, as they say in the TV commercials?

In a word, no.

I knew exactly what that little memory had cost me: $2,641, including round-trip airfare from New York to Denver for three; four nights of lodging in a one-bedroom condo within walking distance of the lifts; four days of skiing for two adults and a child; ski rentals for all of us; two days of ski school for my son; a night's stay out near the Denver airport; and $72 in gas and taxes on our rental car, which I'd paid for with miles. Throw in a couple of hundred dollars for groceries, and we were still under $3,000 for the trip.

Not bad, I thought, with some pleasure, as I made my own way down the slope.

The affordable family ski vacation can seem like an elusive beast. Resorts and airlines take out big ads proclaiming that Kids Fly, Ski or Stay Free, but a glance at the fine print reveals that those promotions don't include the Christmas-to-New Year's or Presidents Day weeks, when kids and their parents are actually free to fly, ski and stay.

Then there are the travel experts who suggest that the way to save is not to book during peak weeks. Gee, thanks. For families, travel is most often dictated by the school calendar, and peak weeks just happen to be the ones we have off.

So over the last four years, my husband and I have refined our own rules for affordable family skiing, and I like to think we've got it down to a formula.

Rule No. 1: Don't pay for chic you're not going to use, which means we don't even look at places like Aspen, with their gilded prices. The sashimi may be incomparable at Matsuhisa, but let's face it, my child really doesn't care.

Rule No. 2: Fly as little as possible. The more planes you take, and the smaller the final airport, the more you're likely to pay. That took Steamboat, Crested Butte and other mountains with diminutive local airports and less-frequent nonstop service off our list. Flying to a city like Salt Lake or Denver can be relatively cheap by comparison. We paid $895 for our three round-trip tickets on bare-bones ATA when we took this trip last February. (This year a search turned up a slightly higher rate on another airline.)

And the final rule: Base-area development is your friend. The more rooms there are at the mountain, the more likely you are to find a deal, even on places walking distance from the lifts. (Goodbye Alta, one of my favorite pre-child mountains.) And with children, why build in the added aggravation of having to drive -- or ride a bus -- to the base every morning?

Using those guidelines, I priced out roughly equivalent vacations at a number of areas before settling on Copper, a mountain known for its varied terrain -- and lack of nightlife -- about 100 miles west of Denver on Interstate 70. The ski giant Intrawest. which purchased Copper in 1997, has been trying to develop it as a destination resort, with new condos and a pedestrian-friendly "village" at the base.

We arrived on Presidents Day and, after a quick stop at the grocery store in nearby Frisco, settled into a surprisingly spacious "silver level" condo apartment, which was decorated in a mix of Texas and Adirondack motifs.

The next morning, after that first run on Vein Glory, we hit the ski-school shape up, a chaotic scrum of children and parents surrounding the polyglot crew of youthful ski instructors. Leaving our son with a teacher named Richard, my husband and I headed to the top of the mountain, where a series of linked bowls offered fresh snow and steep chutes.