I spent a week in 2024 in the mountains of the Republic of Georgia skiing at the largest ski resort, called Gudauri. Many aspects made it wonderful, including perfectly packed powder, almost no lift lines and the prices.
I’d been to Georgia before, back in 2015, on one of those government press junkets. They drove us all the way, eight hours, to Svaneti in a single day, which tells you something about Georgian hospitality and something else about Georgian roads.
This time I came for Traverse, the annual gathering of 200 to 300 travel bloggers, YouTubers, videographers and other content creators that meets somewhere new every year. I’ve been going for six years. The same people keep showing up, nobody gets left behind and there are no cliques. It’s all of us having fun together and I love that. This was a spectacular out-of-the-ordinary location and I dove right in.
We started in Tbilisi, the capital, and what a city it is. Parts of it are gloriously run-down, layers of very old city stacked on itself. I ate khachapuri, the famous cheese pie that is practically the symbol of Georgian cuisine, and I understood immediately why Georgians are so proud of it. Warm, gooey, buttery. Oh yeah. Every meal in the country was an explosion of vegetables, small plates with imaginative organic dishes in a country that’s always been organic.
You can’t visit Georgia without feeling the shadow of its giant neighbor. The country was dominated by the Soviet Union until 1991, and today you’ll see plenty of anti-Russian graffiti. And the worst part is that there are two huge areas of Georgia that have been annexed, leaving a pockmarked map and a lot of resentment. At the same time, many people still speak Russian, and there are many Russians around.
Then came the drive north. I joined a group of 31 others in four minivans heading to the Gudauri Ski Resort, about three and a half hours up the Georgian Military Highway toward the Russian border. And I use the word “highway” loosely.
The trucks on that road are infamous. It’s an almost never-ending convoy of huge rigs grinding north to Russia and south to the capital, beating the pavement to pieces as they go. I took the far back seat and avoided looking, as I always do on scary mountain roads. It all worked out fine.
The skiing itself? The first day was tough. Thick fog, not enough skiers to flatten down the powder and I did a quick faceplant only a few minutes in. So much for grace.
But the next morning the packed powder was magnificent. Light, smooth, no moguls. And here’s the thing about Gudauri: there are no trees anywhere. None. Easier in some ways, but tougher to follow the trails when everything is one big white bowl. And the mountain is as large as Vail, Colorado, with very long runs that are a lot of fun to ski, with nothing that difficult.
Now the prices. Five days of rental gear, everything included: $76. Lift tickets: less than $12 a day. Beers at the ski area: $5. Wow.
Snow grooming is minimal. They cover a fraction of the mountain and don’t put in anything like the hours our resorts do, so it’s easy to hit deceptively thick powder. And hard liquor, wine and beer are for sale right there on the slopes. Everything is cheap. Really cheap.
Off the slopes, the Marco Polo Hotel, right next to the slopes, had a bowling alley, where I spent a happy evening with my best buddy Stevie Haughey from Belfast. I won!
One night, a huge snowstorm buried the parking lot, and people just laughed and struggled through the drifts wearing sneakers. That is Georgia in a nutshell: the infrastructure is held together with hope and the people are wonderful anyway.
The white-knuckle, truck-dodging, don’t-look-down drive I took is on its way out, however, with work on the Kvesheti-Kobi bypass that includes five tunnels, six bridges and a dramatic arch bridge over the Khada Gorge. The trip from Tbilisi to the slopes will be shorter, safer and open year-round. And that was the only thing scary about my experience in Georgia.
Max Hartshorne is the founder of GoNOMAD.com and writes the “Travel with Max” column for the Recorder. Subscribe to his posts at substack.com/maxdeerfield.