Snow Days

          Some ski, some don’t.  These days, there are a lot more of us are in the former group than there were in the early 1900s.  Back then, most New Englanders thought of winter as something to be endured, a necessary evil between harvesting and planting seasons, and the only people who would go out in the cold with a smile on their faces were either children or crazy.

But slowly, the crazies began to make a case for the joys of sliding down snowy hillsides (though they never made much headway on selling the climb up).   In Stowe, Vermont, a few hearty Norwegians had been skiing over impassable winter roads since the late 1800s, to the amusement of the shut-in townspeople.  Then, in 1921, the newly formed Stowe Civic Club put on its first Winter Carnival. As one attendee recalled, “Everyone was very excited about the games and races, but the ski jumping seemed to have impressed them the most, and all wanted skis right away.”  The pro-skiing momentum hit the tipping point with the 1932 Lake Placid Winter Olympics.   Attended by 80,000, and broadcast to millions over the radio, the event, as Sports Illustrated put it, made “the entire country aware for the first time that there was something to do in winter besides wait for spring.”

Early New England skiing was a rustic and rugged affair.  Only dark and winding secondary roads lead to the North Country, inns were rare, equipment primitive. With early skiers piling on layers of wool, strapping strips of seal fur on their skis to provide traction for trudging uphill, and breaking limbs with alarming regularity, it is little wonder that in 1966 Ski magazine described the early days of the sports as “the frolic of a few freaks.”

For solidarity, some of these freaks formed clubs—in Boston, there were the Altebirge club, the Ski Club Hochgebirge, the Schussverein club, and the Drifters, all started by Harvard grads.  Hochgebirge founding member David Arnold, who died in 2015, recalled driving north with skis strapped onto the running boards of his car.  “Chances were,” he said, “if you saw another car with skis on it, you’d know everyone inside!”  On the mountain itself, 10 or 15 skiers would be a crowd.

Of course, the mountains were nothing like the resort destinations of today.  Trails were chopped out by hand, and many “mountains” were really just hillsides, their proximity to roads and scalability by foot being critical attributes.  Local families looking for winter income, ski devotees with access to land, and colleges with budding ski teams were the usual forces behind these spots.

Jeremy Davis, a meteorologist and a self-described “closed ski area enthusiast,” runs the online New England Lost Ski Areas Project, which has documented nearly 600 lost ski areas in New England. (the website, www.nelsap.org, is a remarkable repository of memories, photographs, and mementos.)  “At one point, we estimate that two-thirds of the towns in Vermont and New Hampshire had a ski slope,” Davis says.  There were at least 64 areas in eastern Massachusetts, from Big Red in West Newbury to Cat Rock in Weston to Heavenly Hill in Quincy (“Just 12 minutes from Boston!” boasted the brochure).  A for-friends operation in Southborough was called the “Private Property No Trespassing Keep Out Ski Area,” so christened by the owner after the Commonwealth sent out a lift inspector from the Recreational Tramway Board (yes, there is one).  

These small, family-owned slopes where many children learned to ski in the 1950s and 1960s.  It was a deal: Blanchard Hill in Dunstable, Massachusetts (closed 1984) used to charge kids 5 cents for an all-day lift ticket.   Even Larz Anderson Park just outside Boston had a rope tow; it operated until the early 1970s when, according to one skiers’ recollection, it closed after a boy lost his hand in the mechanism.

Nowadays, there are perhaps 90 ski areas left in New England.  Davis estimates that in the golden year of 1969, Vermont alone had over 200.  What happened?  “Everything went wrong in the 1970s,” says Davis.  “Insurance rates shot up, the Vietnam War took away much of the workforce, there were gas lines, and the rising divorce rate did a number on the nuclear family, which had become so important to these areas.”  Happily, some closed areas are reopening.  Pinnacle Mountain, in Roxbury, New Hampshire, closed down in 1977; two brothers who had grown up skiing there bought it in 1999, worked on it for four years, and reopened it as Granite Gorge in 2003.  They’ve recaptured the magic, if a comment they’ve received from one happy skier is any indication: “I like your place way better than the monster mountains.  No lines, no waiting…no crap!”

Some vintage areas never closed.  The most famous is Mad River Glen, in Waitsfield, Vermont.  With its restored 75-year-old single-chair lift, extremely limited snowmaking, and diehard clientele (to whom the area has been sold, in shares priced at $1,750 each), Mad River continues to offer an old time New England ski experience—though at $70 a day for adults on the weekends, the similarities only go so far. 

But for a real taste of how things used to be, Davis recommends the Mount Greylock Ski Club in South Williamstown, Massachusetts.  It’s been operating since 1937, has two (very fast) rope tows, 17 trails, no snowmaking, no grooming, no electricity, two outhouses, and one wood-heated base lodge where families eat brown-bag lunches.  Members take turns running the gas-powered tows and pitch in on fall work weekends.   But with family memberships at $150 for the season, you’d have to be crazy not to hit its slopes with a smile on your face.