Home is where the heart is. There’s no place like home. Home isn’t a place, it’s a feeling.

Clichés about the concept of “home” abound, in popular culture and on the decor flooding the virtual shelves of Amazon and Etsy. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, as I prepare to move for the first time in over a decade. The joys, comforts, and conveniences (and, yes, frustrations) I know are being put aside for something new. It’s something new that’s only about 20 miles up the road, but still – change is hard.

But beyond the four walls of my apartment, I’m thinking of home in terms of the other steady places in my life. And, this being a ski column, I’ve been considering the idea of a home mountain, a “third place” (beyond work and home) that makes up a big part of your skiing life.

Now, the idea of a home mountain is pretty simple if you’re lucky enough to live (or have a second home) at a ski area. If you’ve got a cabin on Rangeley Lake or live in Bridgton, your home base is probably Saddleback or Shawnee Peak.

On the other hand, if you’re the average skier logging less than 20 days a season, maybe it’s a bit more of a grab bag – you’ve got a couple week-long trips to areas here in Maine or further afield, and your weekends are determined by where the snow is big, the crowds are small, or the deals are significant. I grew up as something of a journeyman skier, with the first 10 years of my ski life spent at the Camden Snow Bowl, Big Moose and everywhere in between.

The rise of the multi-resort passes – Vail’s Epic Pass, Alterra’s Ikon Pass, and the Indy Pass – also throws into flux the idea of the home mountain. Each pass offers skiing at dozens of different areas, with a not-so-subtle incentive to visit as many different areas as possible. The purchase of a season’s pass used to be a way to align yourself with a single mountain for the entirety of a season, but the booming popularity of these passes suggest that many skiers are choosing variety over familiarity.

And yet. And yet! Having a place to call one’s own has an undeniable appeal. After my flirtatious first decade as a skier, I found myself going again and again to Sugarloaf. (Granted, this started when I was 14 and beholden to my father, since I didn’t yet have a driver’s license, but I digress.) I elected to go into the University of Maine’s Ski Industries Program in Farmington, mostly because there wasn’t a campus in Kingfield so it was the closest I could get to Narrow Gauge. Despite being roughly equidistant from Saddleback, Sugarloaf, and Sunday River (and much closer to Titcomb, Spruce Peak, and Black Mountain of Maine), Sugarloaf kept calling to me. It is a connection that has continued to this day, despite moving further and further away from Maine’s western mountains.

When I was in the Ski Industries program, prioritizing on-hill athletics over in-class academics, I used to put in over a hundred days a season. Even as real life has taken hold, I manage about three dozen days a season, mostly spent at Sugarloaf. By my count, I’m closing in on 1,000 days skied at Sugarloaf.

It’s an understatement to say spending that much time at a place affects a person. At this point, I’m fairly confident that there are trails at Sugarloaf I could ski with a blindfold on – I know every roll on Tote Road, every transition and pitch change on Haul Back. By the time I cross the Carrabassett on Route 16, I have a spidey-sense of what the wind, weather, and conditions will be when I get to the top of Access Road. To cite another cliche, it’s often said that familiarity breeds contempt (and, granted, no one complains about a mountain more than its most diehard fans), but any complaints are outweighed by a deep affection for a favorite place.

To lean on one final cliché, statements about home usually lean as much on people as place – your friends and family make a place feel like home. It’s another thing that’s undoubtedly true about a home mountain. When I was growing up, I was always amazed by how often my father ran into people he knew, or who had common friends, when riding up Spillway or Timberline. Now, as I head into my late thirties, I find those connections are happening for me. My old boss, my attorney, a not-insignificant number of UMaine alums, they all ended up in the Sugarloaf orbit as well. Every October the mountain hosts a Homecoming Weekend, and every year it feels more like I’m coming home.

Home is where the heart is. There’s no place like home. Home isn’t a place, it’s a feeling. And, if you have a home mountain, you can feel it. Your heart is there. And there’s no place like it.

Josh Christie is the author of four books, most recently “Skiing Maine,” and co-owner of Print: A Bookstore, an independent bookstore in Portland. He also writes about beer, books and the outdoors.

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