Resorts

Meet the folks who built Aspen’s first chairlifts, 75 years ago.

Aspen Mountain celebrates its 75th anniversary of lift-served slopes this winter, but the area’s skiing history started well before that. In 1899, cut off from supplies by a fierce snowstorm, miners fashioned crude skis from the board walls of their homes and schussed down to Aspen. According to the Aspen Historical Society, the refugees dubbed their escape the first race of the “Hunter’s Pass Ski Club.”

Photo above: The lower mountain in 1947, shows Roch Run and Lift One. To the right of Roch Run is the cut path of the boat tow, which carried skiers through 1946 when Lift One was opened. Aspen Historical Society photo.

Most of the mines closed, but skiing survived. In 1936, several skiers, including Swiss mountaineer André Roch, planned a ski area at Mount Hayden, a few miles southwest of Aspen (see Skiing History, March-April 2021). Roch also plotted the first ski run on Aspen Mountain that year, and it was cut the following summer. Skiers could skin up or catch a ride up the backside on mining trucks. Starting in January 1938, the eight-seat “boat tow” ran 600 feet up the front. The boat was a pair of sleds, hauled by a cable along old mine hoists, powered by a Studebaker engine. Skiers built a warming hut and even a 55-meter ski jump.

“From a local perspective, Aspen was already known as a ski place,” says Tim Willoughby, a former schoolteacher who grew up in town and now contributes a weekly history column to the Aspen Times. He adds that ski clubs came from around the country to race, and the national downhill and slalom championships took place on Roch Run in 1941.

Pfeifer meets the Paepckes

Friedl Pfeifer, an Arlberg-Kandahar combined champion and wounded 10th Mountain Division vet, knew Aspen from his time teaching troops at Camp Hale. He envisioned a full-fledged ski resort on Aspen Mountain and returned there after getting out of the hospital in August 1945. By December, partnered with John Litchfield and Percy Rideout, he had a ski school operating, served by a new rope tow as well as the boat tow.

At the same time—the summer of 1945—outdoorswoman and skier Elizabeth Nitze Paepcke brought her husband, Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke, to Aspen. Paepcke envisioned a cultural center capable of attracting artists, musicians and

intellectuals to a mountain retreat. He immediately invested more than $10,000 in bargain-priced downtown real estate. According to the Chicago Tribune (January 28, 2001), in order to assure the success of his investments and his cultural center, Paepcke threw in with Pfeifer’s ski-resort proposal.

Paepcke, Pfeifer, Litchfield and Rideout formed the Aspen Ski Corporation in 1946. Paepcke undertook to raise $300,000 for lift construction, mostly among Chicago investors. As

they planned the lifts, the new partners had to negotiate leases with the owners of mining claims scattered around the mountain. Denver attorney Bill Hodges was hired to help with the process, and became an investor. Many of the claims belonged to D.R.C. “Darcy” Brown Jr., who then invested in the Ski Corp., too.

Local crews pitch in

In summer 1946, construction began on two single-chair lifts that together would ferry skiers more than 3,000 vertical feet to the summit, opening a vast swath of terrain and creating one of the country’s premier ski destinations. A September 1946 article in the Aspen Daily Times reported that Lift 1 would be the world’s longest (at 8,400 feet in distance) and fastest chair (550 feet/minute), as well as the one with the most capacity (275 riders/hour) and largest vertical rise (2,400 feet). The lifts would serve more than 22 miles of ski trails.

As lift lines were cleared and construction started, a trail crew headed by Litchfield and Rideout cut new runs and widened Roch Run. Wrote the Aspen Times in 1945, “Contrary to the popular belief that skiing on Aspen Mountain will be only for the above average, there will be many places on the upper slopes … that will satisfy and delight every class of ability.”

Delayed parts

The transformation into a ski hill overlapped the end of the mining era. Willoughby’s uncle, Frank, a mining engineer and president of the ski club, surveyed the lift lines. Willoughby’s father, Fred Jr., worked in the family’s Midnight Mine on the mountain’s backside, and helped oversee construction of Lifts 1 and 2. As Willoughby relates, the lift tower foundations had been prepped, but the towers themselves were delayed and didn’t arrive until late in October, when snow had already begun to fall.

Paul Purchard, a Swiss-born engineer then living in Denver, designed some of the Lift 1 components. His future son-in-law Harry Poschman, a 10th Mountain veteran, worked on the construction crew pushing to get the chairs in place for the winter. “He said it was miserable work,” said Harry's son Greg Poschman, today a Pitkin County Commissioner. “They got the last bullwheels on as the snow was flying.”

Then the Lift 1 electric motor didn’t show up (partially due to a post-war copper shortage), and a backup gasoline engine ran it the first winter. When Fred Willoughby became superintendent of lift operations, he had to go partway up the mountain every morning to fire up the engine (an electric motor could have been turned on from the base). Meanwhile, Lift 2 had a money-saving design that used recycled mining-tram parts. “The whole winter my father kept fixing that lift,” says Tim Willoughby. The next season, Fred Jr. was back with the family business. “He was a miner,” Willoughby adds. “Running the ski lifts wasn’t what he wanted to do.”

The mountaintop Sundeck, an innovative octagonal day lodge designed by prominent Bauhaus architect Herbert Bayer, was completed in November.

When Lift 1 debuted on December 14, 1946, rides were free for the day; afterward, a day pass cost $3.75 ($1.50 for locals), about $53 and $21 in today’s money. Lift 2 opened the following week. On January 11, 1947, the official grand opening took place, with Colorado’s Governor-elect William Lee Knaus, Senator Edwin Johnson, other dignitaries and a slew of media on hand.

45-minute ride

A ride to the summit via the two chairs lasted 45 minutes. Skiers shivered with cold. A yellow, wool-lined canvas tarp covered the chair, with a poncho-style hole for the passenger’s head, recalls Marilyn Wilmerding, whose father, Bill Hodges, served as Ski Corp. president from 1951 to 1957. “We all wore raccoon coats that we found at the thrift shop,” she adds. Once off the lift, “you’d take off your fur coat, throw it on the chair, and it would go back down. There was a big, flat table at the bottom of the mountain with a pile of these fur coats. You’d rifle through them and find yours, then put it back on and get in line for the lift.”

The long, frigid lift rides inspired Klaus Obermeyer, who arrived in Aspen in late 1947, to design and sell his first down jackets.

By the second season of lift-served skiing, the new Little Nell run had been cleared at the base to accommodate beginners, served by a T-bar. Friedl Pfeifer had resigned as head of the Ski Corp., though he continued to lead the ski school, which was a separate entity. Aspen was on its way to becoming a celebrated ski destination. In 1950, thanks to the lobbying efforts of Frank Willoughby and Ski Corp. general manager Dick Durrance, the FIS World Alpine Championships came to Aspen, the first time the event was held outside of Europe.

Not everyone shared the enthusiasm. Even before the lifts opened, some locals worried that a sport catering to the rich would lead to inflated prices and an insurmountable class divide. “There is a possible danger in the current campaign to dust off and refurbish the mining camps of yesteryear,” wrote columnist Lee Casey in a 1946 Rocky Mountain News opinion piece titled “Worry About Aspen.” He warned of “Sun Valley prices” and an “invidious distinction” between wealthy tourists and locals.

Aspen attracted an eclectic mix of new residents drawn by the developing economic base, new cultural organizations like the Aspen Music Festival and the charm of a remote and scenic community. Recalls Poschman, “It was a place for refugees, heirs and heiresses thrown out of their families, gay people shunned by their East Coast families. The stories my parents would tell.” He adds, “There were former German soldiers who were skiers, next to 10th Mountain guys, all drinking beer together in the Red Onion.”

Ski bum life

Poschman’s parents met as young ski bums in Alta and became engaged in the summer of 1946, when Harry was working on the Aspen lift-building crew. They moved to town full time in 1950 and ran the Edelweiss Inn out of an old Victorian on Main Street before building their own lodge, with Swiss-style chalets, later in the decade.

“We thought it was the most wonderful way to make a living in the world,” says Jony Larrowe (Greg Poschman’s mother). Larrowe skied for a few hours whenever she could get a babysitter, and Harry instructed in Pfeifer’s ski school, by that time co-directed by Fred Iselin. “Aspen became pretty famous, pretty fast,” says Larrowe. Most of the early Edelweiss guests came from Texas and elsewhere in Colorado and included college students, who paid just $2.75 a night if they brought a sleeping bag.

Larrowe’s own experience to the contrary, she says that skiing was still more of a man’s sport in the early 1950s and that lodge guests were “either single men or families who loved to ski and wanted their kids to learn how.”

Of course, Aspen kids didn’t have to wait for a family vacation to tackle the slopes. “The first time I skied Aspen Mountain was in 1949,” says rancher Tony Vagneur, whose great-grandparents settled in the area in the 1880s. “I was three years old.” Vagneur remembers struggling with too-long skis as he descended the Little Nell run. Too small to ride the T-bar, he needed someone else to pull him up the hill.

By first grade, Vagneur and friend Jimmie Johnson were skiing together every weekend, covering most of the mountain. “Every run was an adventure,” he says. “It probably still is for kids today.”

The elementary school released kids early on Wednesdays, and they could either ski on Aspen Mountain, ice skate or go to study hall. Vagneur, no surprise, opted to ski. When Vagneur was in fifth grade, his father worked on the mountain, running Lift 2 from its bottom station. Vagneur would sneak a ride up Lift 1 with his father in the early morning, then ski down and head to school—until the time mountain manager Red Rowland caught him doing it. “He was at Midway [at the top of Lift 1] when I got off the lift that morning, and he said, ‘What are you doing here?’” relates Vagneur. “He made me quit.”

Vagneur spent seven years on ski patrol in the 1970s and today gives weekly history ski tours on behalf of the Aspen Historical Society. Despite the addition of lifts and a gondola, as well as more runs, “It still seems like the same place to me,” he says. “I start down the top of Copper and think, ‘Yeah, I’m home.’ It’s kind of like walking up the sidewalk to your house.”

Darcy Brown took over as president of the Ski Corp. in 1957, and his daughter Ruthie Brown grew up skiing Aspen Mountain. One of the resort’s best-known trails, Ruthie’s Run, is named after Darcy’s wife. As Brown tells it, her mother didn’t like skiing the standard route down the mountain. So she asked Red Rowland to cut a new trail for her. Ruthie’s Run opened to the public in December 1948. “It’s flowing and has great views of Aspen,” says Brown. “And my mother loved the sun. It gets the last sun of the day.”

Marilyn Wilmerding’s family came to Aspen on weekends and holidays, and during the summer, as her father fulfilled many of his Ski Corp. responsibilities from Denver. The Hodges first shared ownership of a Victorian with the Robinson and Coors families, then built an A-frame on Red Mountain, where Wilmerding lives today. As a young girl, she skied Aspen Mountain every chance she had. Angling for first chair each morning, she and her brother would arrive at the base of Lift 1 at 7 a.m. and line up their skis, then eat breakfast at the nearby Skier’s Chalet and board the lift when it opened at 9 a.m. “We would ski until the very end of the day,” she says.

After skiing, Wilmerding says, “Everyone would gather at the Hotel Jerome. Kids would run up one set of stairs in the lobby and down the other. It was like our own little club.” Dinners out were at the Red Onion, and the Isis Theatre showed the latest movies. She also remembers her parents going to lively parties at the “Pink House,” owned by the Browns. “It was a magical time to be here,” Wilmerding says. “Aspen has marked so many people, hasn’t it?”

Indeed, those heady early days of lift-served skiing launched Aspen on a trajectory that’s soared beyond what anyone may have imagined 75 years ago. And whether they were miners, ranchers, 10th Mountain veterans, ski visionaries or souls in search of a beautiful and free-wheeling place to live, residents during the first years of the new era were indelibly affected—perhaps none more so than the people who labored to create the new ski area.

Twenty-five years after the lifts opened on Aspen Mountain, in 1971, Lift 1A replaced Lift 1, starting farther uphill. Tim Willoughby relates seeing a photo in the Aspen Times of a helicopter removing the original lift towers. “I was with my father, who was living in California at that point,” he says. “He just looked at the photo: ‘I spent a whole year building that sucker, and in something like four hours they pulled it all out.’ It was one of his great achievements in life, and in a few hours, it was gone.” 

Author Cindy Hirschfeld is editor-in-chief of Cross Country Skier magazine. She spent six years as chief editor, successively, at Aspen Magazine and Aspen Sojourner.

Resorts: From CCC-cut trails to a new gondola, the state-owned ski area has become a public-works success story. 

Photo above: Opening day in January 1950, launched the first chairlift in New York State. The Roebling single was built by the New Jersey company that built the Brooklyn Bridge. Belleayre Mountain photo.

On Christmas Eve 2020, as Belleayre Ski Area was settling into operation under Covid-19 restrictions, six inches of rain fell overnight. Christmas dawn revealed that a wet-snow avalanche had cascaded through the windows and across the floor of the upper-mountain Overlook Lodge. The resort closed for two days. The lower base lodge was not affected.

It hasn’t always been easy going for Belleayre, the Catskills ski area owned and operated by New York State. But over the past four years, the state has come through with $25 million to build a bottom-to-top gondola and a new quad lift, plus other upgrades. After 70 years, the resort’s viability seems assured.

Just a two-hour drive north of the George Washington Bridge, and in the heart of the Catskills resort region, Belleayre has always had the advantage of location. Partly because of the state’s involvement, in 1950 it became the first chairlift-served ski area in New York. But as a public entity, Belleayre has had a complex legal history.

Partly to assure clean water for New York City, the state instituted a “Forever Wild” article in the state constitution in 1895. That was amended by referendum in November 1941 to allow construction of a ski area on Marble Mountain near Lake Placid (see Skiing History, May-June 2015). World War II halted work on that ambitious project.

Maltby Shipp of nearby Newburgh, with his son, gained local fame in 1929 as the first to hike up and ski down Belleayre’s 2,000 vertical feet, and the Civilian Conservation Corp cleared a trail—one of seven Catskill ski trails cut during the Depression years.

Returning WWII veterans led the resurgence of interest in skiing, and beginning in 1945, the Central Catskills Association, a group of local business and civic leaders, pushed for the development of a state-owned ski area that would add winter recreation to this already popular summer tourist destination. In 1947, the state passed legislation to allow additional ski area development at Belleayre and at North Creek.

Skiing was just an extension of what New York was already doing, according to Lowell Thomas, then the spokesman for the state’s Chamber of Commerce: “Both ski centers should offer in winter the same sort of inexpensive recreation as Jones Beach offers in the summer,” he said.

The construction of the ski area started in 1949 under the supervision of Art Draper. A Harvard graduate and New York Times reporter, Draper fled the city in 1938 to become a forest ranger. He helped to launch the Marble Mountain project, then, at the relatively advanced age of 32, he volunteered for the 10th Mountain Division and saw heavy combat as a medic. He would serve as Belleayre’s first superintendent, the state’s quaint term for what anyone else would call a general manager. 

The state allocated the manpower and $250,000 to build three main trails, a summit lodge, a temporary base lodge, a cafeteria, a workshop, a mile of access road and a 400-car parking lot.

Draper brought in Otto Schniebs, the one-time Dartmouth ski coach, who by then was living in Lake Placid and coaching the St. Lawrence University ski team. In the 1930s he had been involved in the layout of the Thunderbird race trail on Mt. Greylock in the Berkshires and then in planning for Marble Mountain. He would advise on Belleayre’s trails and lifts layout.

Draper also brought to Belleayre Dot Hoyt Nebel, whom he knew from North Creek, where she had been the director of the Ski Bowl Ski School (Ski Bowl got a rope tow in 1935, to serve ski-train tourists). A math teacher turned ski racer, Nebel had been selected to the U.S. Alpine team for the cancelled 1940 Winter Olympics and during the war taught skiing at Pico Peak, where she was Andrea Mead’s first race coach. She was not impressed with the trail layout proposed for Belleayre. Nebel believed the ski trails should follow the fall line. And she knew how to make that happen. “You just go to the top of the mountain and drop a ball,” she said years later. “You see where it goes and that is where you make the trail.”  She would remain at Belleayre for 17 years as head of the ski school. The Dot Nebel is a black-diamond run at the mountain today.

At the opening on January 22, 1950, Belleayre featured an electric rope tow and a 3,000-foot long Roebling single chair, the first chairlift in New York State. There wasn’t enough snow to ski that day but several hundred sightseers rode the lift for free. Enough snow arrived in February for Belleayre to co-host the New York State Alpine Combined Championships (the other co-host was Highmount, a rope-tow area on the north side of Belleayre, founded in 1947). The cost of the Belleayre lift ticket that winter was $3.50. 

Belleayre grew in the next decades and its separate lower mountain beginner terrain was especially popular. In the meantime, the Marble Mountain ski area had proven a wind-scoured bust. With Draper in the lead, supported by Gov. Averell Harriman, the state opened nearby Whiteface in 1956. Gore Mountain opened in 1964.

At the time, the three ski areas were managed by New York’s Department of Conservation. The state’s budget year ended on March 31, and that meant each of the areas closed on that date, no matter what the snow conditions at the time. 

In 1974, after years of trying, Lake Placid was awarded the 1980 Winter Olympics. Leading up to the games, the state ponied up millions of dollars for facilities upgrades. There wasn’t much money for the other two state areas.  

Then the games were over.

New York State officials had paid attention to the aftermath of the 1960 Olympics. Twenty years later little evidence remained at Squaw Valley that the event had ever occurred. To assure that its investment would be preserved and utilized, in 1981 New York’s legislature created the Olympic Regional Development Authority (ORDA) to manage and market the Lake Placid facilities. The first CEO was Ned Harkness, a prominent hockey coach and facilities executive, who served until 1993.

While the Olympic facilities got the attention, Belleayre and Gore were initially left out of ORDA. Facilities had aged and snowmaking, the lifeblood of Eastern skiing, was minimal. Gore was folded into ORDA in 1984, but at the same time the state comptroller recommended closure of Belleayre. Governor Mario Cuomo budgeted only $100,000 for the area, just enough to shut it down.

A grassroots organization, the Coalition to Save Belleayre, quickly sprang up, headed by Joe Kelly, a New York City securities industry executive and long-time Catskills second-home owner. Thirteen thousand people signed a petition to save the ski area.

The New York Times and the New York Post were the two most prominent newspapers to run editorials supporting Belleayre. The economic impact of the ski area on the regional economy was a major argument. It worked. Before the end of 1984, the decision to close Belleayre was reversed. Over the next eight years, the state allocated $6 million to upgrade machinery and equipment at the area. In 1987, voters approved another constitutional amendment allowing expansion of the ski terrain and improvements to the trail layout.

Finally, in 2012, ORDA took over Belleayre, under a blended board of directors that includes representation from all three state-owned ski areas. It seems to be a good arrangement. Belleayre now has expanded snowmaking to cover 96 percent of the terrain, which includes 50 trails spread over 175 acres, plus increased base lodge capacity. With the Catskill Thunder gondola installed in 2017 and a new detachable quad lift in 2020, the future of the area seems solid. Avalanches notwithstanding. 

Phil Johnson is a ski columnist for the Syracuse Daily Gazette. His last Skiing History article was a visit with Hunter Mountain’s Karl Plattner (May-June 2017).

Shuttered for five years, Maine's Saddleback Mountain has reopened. Can it do well by doing good?

December 15, 2020, dawned cold and windy—and with the Covid-19 pandemic raging. But that didn’t stop about 300 skiers and boarders from riding the new Rangeley high-speed quad at Saddleback Mountain near Rangeley, Maine. It was the first time in five seasons that the lifts had spun at Saddleback—one of New England’s hidden gems. And more than just the ski area’s loyalists were happy. The entire region breathed a sigh of relief.

“There’s been a steady stream of people who have come to me, some of them ecstatic, some of them just really emotional, about how much it means to them that the mountain is open again,” said Saddleback CEO and general manager Andy Shepard. He’s a former L.L. Bean executive who started the Maine Winter Sports Center (now Outdoor Sport Institute) to help revive the economy of Maine’s far northern Aroostook County and teach the area’s youth how to ski.

But this is more than a story of a shuttered ski area’s resurrection. In an era of mass consolidation in the ski industry, it’s a story about a new model of ski-area ownership built on the foundation of impact investing, a financial strategy, growing in popularity, aimed to deliver social benefits in addition to financial gains. In Saddleback’s case, it’s about bringing back jobs and helping the local economy, which in turn helps the local community.

When Saddleback opened on New Year’s Eve 1960—with a 4,120-foot summit and the highest base elevation in New England—the owners envisioned the resort becoming the “Sun Valley of the East.” It promised 2,000 vertical feet of skiing, 200 inches of snow annually, and stunning views of the Rangeley Lakes region—the lakes themselves offer four-season recreation. But the lofty ideal was never achieved. The secluded resort—a three-hour drive from Portland and four-plus hours from Boston—was perhaps too secluded, especially with limited lodging in the area. During Saddleback’s first 18 years, it had five owners.

In 1978, Donald Breen, a Massachusetts businessman, came along with plans to revive the ski area. But the Appalachian Trail corridor runs across Saddleback’s above-timberline summit, and Breen spent almost two decades battling the National Park Service over access rights to the trail corridor. By the time Breen and the NPS came to an agreement in 2000, the battle had derailed Breen’s expansion plans. He sold the area for $8 million to retired University of Maine geologist Bill Berry and his wife, Irene, in 2003.

For a decade, the Berrys ran Saddleback as a labor of love, improving snowmaking, enlarging the base lodge, adding more expert terrain, and replacing a vertiginous T-bar with a chairlift. Saddleback has always had a devoted community of skiers—“a sense of family that I have not experienced, and I’ve been in this business for a long time,” noted Shepard. Saddleback patrons included locals and part-time residents alike, with nary a distinction between them—unlike the contentious vibe between the two groups at many large resorts. Skier visits climbed steadily.

But the Berrys had to weather the Great Recession (2007-2009), and Saddleback lacked a high-speed chairlift—an amenity that has become a standard resort convenience, even at modest ski areas. As a result, annual skier visits began to decline.

Unwilling to invest further capital, the Berrys put Saddleback on the market for $12 million in December 2012. But no buyers came forth. Three years later, they announced that if they could not acquire $3 million in funding for a new chairlift, they would not open for the season.

Potential buyers came and went over the next four years, including a group of Saddleback faithful who wanted to operate the mountain as a nonprofit Mad River Glen-like co-op. Then came a shyster from Australia proposing an EB-5 Ponzi scheme similar to the failed debacle at Vermont’s Jay Peak. “The community was put through the wringer, hopes raised and dashed on a regular basis,” said Shepard.

Locals and Saddleback fans had almost given up hope when Shepard’s group rode in on a white horse. Or rather a horse of a different color. Knowing how important Saddleback was to the Rangeley community, Shepard had been working with the Berrys since 2014 to secure a suitable buyer. And with his experience founding the Maine Winter Sports Center, Shepard knew that the mountain was as important an economic driver to the Rangeley region as the Sports Center was to Aroostook County.

He knew Saddleback could be profitable—but only if someone would first inject millions of dollars into the infrastructure. But who was going to invest that kind of money in an out-of-the-way ski area and in an industry that is susceptible to climate change? A traditional investor looking for private equity-style returns would look elsewhere. The state's Department of Economic and Community Development knew where to look. Early in 2018, they brought in Boston-based  Arctaris Impact Fund, which has been investing in projects in the Rust Belt and other economically disadvantaged areas for more than a decade. Arctaris leverages non-traditional impact investors and nonprofit foundations that are motivated by making a societal difference and will settle for smaller returns, New Markets Tax Credits, state-guaranteed loans, and support from the community and local foundations. Saddleback fit the profile.

It took two years to close the agreement, but Arctaris purchased Saddleback on January 31, 2020, for $6.5 million, with a plan to invest $38 million over the next five years in new lifts, base lodge refurbishment, a new mid-mountain lodge, a solar array to power the mountain, a hotel, daycare center, employee housing, and other modern resort necessities. 

Arctaris co-founder Jonathan Tower sees the deal as a chance to revitalize a region hit hard by Saddleback’s closing. “This is about more than opening a mountain,” said Tower. “This is about restoring 200-plus jobs to the community. It’s about the regional economic impact of Saddleback. And it’s about the health and wellness benefits of an operational mountain.”

With negotiations complete, Arctaris asked Shepard to become Saddleback’s CEO and general manager. Shepard was especially attracted to the deep connection between mountain and community. “It’s more than a ski area,” he said. “It’s been a family to people. There’s a deep sense of responsibility that goes along with that. Knowing that we’re stewards of that kind of connection is important to me. I’ve tried to make sure we build an organization of people to whom that’s equally important.”

Both the pandemic and the regional economy made Saddleback’s first season a challenge. Many people who once worked at Saddleback have moved away, so the hiring pool is smaller than it once was. But Shepard is confident that workers will be lured back by competitive wages, a creative program to provide year-round benefits like health insurance to seasonal workers, and the soon-to-be-built employee housing and daycare center.

Saddleback’s modest pass prices for youth and elders is another nod to the community. Purchase a season pass in the spring and prices range from $30 (under 6) to $50 for local students to $30 for a super senior pass (80 and over)—a pass category that is no longer offered at most resorts. In addition, all passes can be purchased under an installment plan.

Shepard is equally confident that the new Rangeley high-speed quad, which cut the 11-minute ride time by more than half, a refurbished base lodge, and a planned mid-mountain lodge atop the quad will attract more skiers to Saddleback. The mid-mountain lodge will have views west to New Hampshire’s Mount Washington and a flat roof planted with sod and blueberry bushes so that the building is largely hidden from across the ridgeline.

When new skiers and riders discover Saddleback, Shepard hopes that they will integrate into the community, as has happened for generations. “People care for one another here,” he explained. “There’s very little judgment about political opinions and who’s got money and who doesn’t. It’s just people who love Saddleback, people who love doing things with family and friends.” 

Cooperstown hit two fouls, then a 380-foot home run.

Photo above: Kate and Chris Mulhern at the base of Mt. Otsego in 1958. The main slope is visible behind the sign, with the rope tow to the right. Courtesy Barbara Harrison Mulhern

Cooperstown is, of course, forever the home of baseball, hosting the National Baseball Hall of fame since 1939. But it’s also the center of a pioneering New York ski region. Here, community leaders and volunteers created skiing opportunities at four locations for over 40 years.

Cooperstown, at the foot of Lake Otsego, lies in hilly terrain with annual snowfalls approaching 90 inches per year. In the early to middle 1930s, skiers toured these hills, including the Fenimore Slope next to today’s Farmers Museum. The land, now just north of the downtown district, was once owned by James Fenimore Cooper, author of The Last of the Mohicans.

New York State’s first rope tow operated for the 1935-1936 season in North Creek in the Adirondacks. In the fall of 1937, the Cooperstown Chamber of Commerce began making plans for a ski lift. A suitable location was found on the former Robert Sterling Clark estate in Bowerstown, located about a mile south of Cooperstown Central. By 1937 it was county land. A 1,200-foot gasoline-powered rope tow was installed, and the Reynolds brothers hired to operate it.

The tow officially opened on January 15, 1938 to enthusiastic skiers and spectators who had never seen anything like it. Skiers came from as far away as Binghamton, and more than 75 cars lined adjacent roads. However, improvements were needed: snow fencing, better grading for the tow, and lights for night skiing. These were installed over the next few months, but a lack of snow limited operation. Higher elevations nearby promised more consistent snowfall, and thoughts turned to relocating the tow.

Tow Moved to Drake Farm

In the summer of 1938, the Sports Committee of the Chamber of Commerce began the hunt for a new location. Dr. Francis Harrison, Sherman Hoyt, and others explored hills to the north, in Pierstown. Harrison’s daughter Barbara Mulhern, now in her 90s, remembers “riding along with my father and his cronies” on dirt roads as they scouted the region.

They found what they thought might be the perfect slope, on Drake Farm, 500 to 700 feet higher than Bowerstown. The tow was moved, lengthened and installed during the fall of 1938. The higher elevation was expected to provide deeper, more consistent snow depths.

To promote the bigger hill, the committee transformed into the Cooperstown Winter Sports Association. Lester Hanson, a founding CWSA shareholder and neighboring farmer, ran the tow. He would run tows here and at other locations for nearly forty years.

Despite the Association’s best hopes, the location was fraught with problems. While skiers came from all around to check out the new ski area, strong winds scoured portions of the slope clear. A third location would need to be considered for the following year.

The Opening of Mt. Otsego

The Association did not need to look far. To the south of Drake Farm, a broad slope offered 380 feet of sheltered vertical on the Lamb Farm. The tow was moved again, to its final location, for the 1939-1940 season. The Lamb farmhouse would serve refreshments to skiers.

The name Mt. Otsego was chosen, for the lake, called “Glimmerglass” in Cooper’s novel The Deerslayer. In November, crews cleared brush and cut new trails. Hanson fired up the tow in December of 1939.

To promote the ski area, the Cooperstown Ski Club was formed the same year. Vice president was Nick Sterling, principal at Cooperstown Central School. The club aimed to make skiing affordable for everyone. Membership was set at just one dollar for adults, and 25 cents for children. Principal Sterling arranged for school kids to get free ski lessons, taught by volunteers. Over several decades, thousands of students entered the sport.

Cooperstown Hires Inga Grauers

Shortly after organizing, the Cooperstown Ski Club hired Miss Inga Grauers, 30, the only certified female ski instructor in Sweden. A pupil of Hannes Schneider in St. Anton, Grauers was expert in the Arlberg technique. She left Sweden at the outbreak of World War II, to find new opportunities in the United States. For two seasons from 1939-1941, she taught at the Fenimore Slope on weekdays and the Mt. Otsego slope on weekends.

At the end of the 1940-1941 season, Grauers left to teach skiing at Stowe, Vermont. She married E. Gardner Prime, and after the war the couple purchased the Alpine Lodge in Lake Placid, where they started their own rope tow ski area. Later, Inga became a ski legend at Vail, and was featured in the 2002 backcountry documentary “Spirit of Skiing.”

Snow Trains

Many of the early New York ski areas were far from major population centers. The Cooperstown Ski Club arranged for several snow trains to visit Mt. Otsego in 1940 and 1941. Trains came from Albany, and even from New York City, bringing up to 400 skiers at a time. Skiers were picked up at the Delaware & Hudson Station in Cooperstown and brought to Mt. Otsego in any available vehicle.

Formation of the Ski Patrol

It became clear after the opening of Mt. Otsego that a ski patrol was needed. In late 1939, Carlotta Harrison, the wife of Dr. Harrison, met with Minot Dole in New York City to begin organizing a patrol, just a year after Dole started the National Ski Patrol. Dr. Harrison was the first patrol leader. A future patrol leader, Charlie Michaels, now in his 80s, learned to ski as a kid at Otsego, in exchange for hauling gas cans to run the rope tow.

Fenimore Slope Gets a Tow

The Fenimore Slope did have the benefit of being close to town. In the late 1940s, Lester Hanson put in a rope tow and lights for night skiing. The tow opened weekday afternoons and evenings, and occasionally on weekends. The slope was abandoned in 1950.

Otsego Reaches its Peak

Like many ski areas, Mt. Otsego closed during World War II. It reopened in the fall of 1945. Additional beginner tows were added, and by 1950 skiers enjoyed new trails and slopes, including Natty Bumppo. A new lodge went up in 1956, transforming Mt. Otsego into a center for community activities through the 1960s.

The largest capital project at Mt. Otsego was a Hall T-bar on new slopes south of the rope tow. Another T-bar was later proposed to replace the main rope tow, but skiers protested—the T-bar would take at least twice as long to ride, resulting in fewer runs. In 1963, Lester Hanson, who over the years had been buying up shares from his partners, finally owned the ski area.

Later Years of Mt. Otsego

The 1970s were not kind to many smaller ski areas throughout New York, and Mt. Otsego was no exception. Back-to-back mild winters in 1973 and 1974, gas shortages, rising insurance rates, a lack of snowmaking, and aging facilities took their toll. The area closed during the 1976-1977 season.

Lester Hanson sold Mt. Otsego in 1978, and a series of new owners tried to resuscitate the area. In most years, only the T-bar operated, and only when natural snow allowed. At the conclusion of the 1982 ski season, Mt. Otsego closed for good.

Today

The former Mt. Otsego Ski Area is on private property, clearly visible from Wedderspoon Hollow Road. The T-bar was removed and sold for scrap, though its drive building remains. The rope tows are long gone. The landowners have kept most of the trails clear.

Mt. Otsego may be gone, but like other small areas that closed in the ’60s and ’70s, its legacy lives on with the thousands of skiers who learned the sport there as kids and passed the passion on to their own families. 

Just a few miles from glitzy St. Moritz, the cultural heart of this Swiss ski region beats quietly in Pontresina. 

The history of the Swiss resort town of Pontresina is inextricably linked to its glamorous neighbor, St. Moritz, which lies five miles away. Pontresina has always played second fiddle to St. Moritz, which was the cradle of winter sports in Switzerland and hosted the Winter Olympics in 1928 and 1948.

Photo above: At 42 kilometers, the Engadin Skimarathon, the second
largest cross-country ski race in the world, is bucket-list worthy for 14,000 racers each March.

Today, St. Moritz is closer in spirit to Monaco, an outpost of the uber rich. But take a 10-minute drive along the Val Bernina, the high-altitude valley that branches off the Upper Engadin Valley, and you’ll discover the cultural heart of the region in Pontresina. Much smaller than its glamorous sibling, the town lies at 5,822 feet elevation and is laid out on a long ridge on the south-facing shelf of Alp Languard mountain. It is subtly elegant, and redolent of the Belle Epoque with its cobblestone streets and pastel-colored stucco houses.

Many of these quaint buildings, which date back to the 17th century, are decked out in s’graffito, the stenciled plaster designs that are hallmarks of the region. The word itself is the origin of the term “graffiti” and the designs are of striking geometric patterns, fish, stars and whimsical beasts, along with sundials etched onto the sides of the homes.

The locals greet each other not with “Gruezi,” the Swiss German greeting, but “Allegra,” which is how one says hello in Romansch, the Latin-based mountain language. Less than 70,000 people still speak Switzerland’s fourth language (after German, French and Italian) and Pontresina is a bastion of Romansch. If you paid attention in 10th grade Latin class, you will be amazed at how much you can decipher.

Pontresina offers astonishing panoramic views of nearby mountains, the Roseg Glacier and the pistes of Corviglia and Corvatsch that rise up behind St. Moritz. Surrounding this genteel, well-heeled town are pine and larch forests. It’s an alpine landscape that was beloved by Italian-Swiss artist Giovanni Segantini, who spent much of his life painting it.

The main ski areas of Pontresina are Lagalb and Diavolezza, the latter resembling a giant, undulating meringue and offering glacier skiing as early as October and running as late as May. Closer to Pontresina is the Morterasch Glacier, the largest glacier by area in the Bernina Range of the Bündner Alps. There’s a 10km route along the glacier from Diavolezza, the longest glacier ski in Switzerland. So famed was the glacier that it was painted in the 19th century by Albert Bierstadt and drawn by John Singer Sargent. But what once was an attraction for Victorian visitors is now a poster child for vanishing glaciers. It has retreated nearly two miles since the late 19th century and in the past few years, the Swiss have enlisted snow guns to try and save the glacier from melting further.

Roughly translated, Pontresina means “bridge of the Saracens,” referring to Moorish brigands who raided here in the 10th century. It has the venerable Santa Maria Church, with its Byzantine-Romanesque frescoes, as well as the ruins of the 13th century Spaniola tower. There is also the Museum Alpin, set in a historic house filled not only with artifacts of daily life from this town but ski memorabilia.

In short, you go to St. Moritz for partying, shopping and nightclubbing. You go to Pontresina because you want to gaze out your hotel window onto the moonlit Roseg Glacier, fall asleep to the bells of the San Nicolò church, and then rise early to hit the pistes.

SKI HISTORY

As St. Moritz slowly developed into a winter sports resort in the late 19th century, Pontresina followed in its footsteps. By the 1870s, the Upper Engadine valley was being transformed with the arrival of tourists, most of them upper-class British, who came to climb, to walk and, eventually, to ski.

The importance of high-born British driving this change can’t be underestimated. As in St. Moritz, guesthouses and hotels in Pontresina were expanded or built to accommodate these new visitors. By the late 19th century, the so-called English Church was built in the heart of town, the Holy Trinity Church Pontresina, which some architectural historians considered the most important work of English church architecture in Switzerland. It was razed in the mid-20th century but even today, you can see parts of it, including the altar railing donated by one of Queen Victoria’s nieces, in the Museum Alpin.

As with St. Moritz, the history of the resorts, or at least their spirit, can be found within the walls of the great hotels. What began as a modest guesthouse that opened in 1848 evolved into the Grand Hotel Kronenhof, the grandest of Pontresina’s grand hotels, by 1898. The 112-guestroom palatial hotel commands the best view of the mountains and glaciers, and in the hotel’s basement wooden skis still line the walls, some of them left behind by English guests who stored them here nearly a century ago.

Other examples include the three-star Sporthotel Pontresina, an Art Nouveau beauty with etched glass windows and an elaborate central cast-iron stairway that opened in 1881. Swiss hotelier Leo Trippi, whose namesake company is today a luxury tour operator in London, was born in nearby Samedan and got his start in the 19th century running the family hotel in Pontresina.

In the Victorian era, Pontresina welcomed Sir Arthur Sullivan, of Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera fame, who organized a charity concert to raise funds for the English Church while visiting. The English writers Matthew Arnold and Elizabeth Gaskell found it a great place to linger and work, as did Hans-Christian Andersen and the composer Richard Strauss. These days, with the exception of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who spends her Christmas holidays here, the famous, the wanna-bes and their entourages head to St. Moritz for the glitz. In Pontresina, the streets and the money are quiet.

An English friend of mine has framed the bill of sale for her father’s ski trip to Pontresina in 1925, when he was a student at Oxford. It included second- and third-class rail transport from London, steamer passage across the English Channel, and 12 nights of room and board at the long-gone Hotel Park, all for a grand total of 19.83 pound sterling. It may sound cheap but in today’s currency, that would amount to about $1,612, far from a cheap ski holiday on a student budget in 1925.

THE SPORTS

The SkiClub Bernina Pontresina was founded in 1903, at the same time as the Swiss Ski Association. The focus was on ski tours, at a time when a single pole was still used in the sport.

After the world’s first bobsled club was founded in St Moritz in 1897 and a dedicated bobsled track was built in 1904, Pontresina joined the bobsled craze just a year later, in 1905, building two bobsled tracks.

As with many European ski resorts, the enthusiasm for ski jumping drove the need for infrastructure. The first ski jumping hills in Pontresina were set up in the beginning of the 20th century and allowed jumps of 20 to 30 meters. These included Clüx-Schanze, near the current valley station of the Languard ski lift, as well as Piccolischanze, which was on a steep slope below Spaniola tower. In 1907, construction of the Bernina-Sprungschanze in the Roseg valley started, which was opened officially in winter 1912 as a 40-meter hill. In 1925, under the direction of local builder and skier Luigi Costa, the SkiClub Pontresina opened a new ski jumping facility in the Val Roseg that made 80-meter jumps possible.

Up to four international competitions were held each winter and were considered the leading ones in Europe. It was in Pontresina in 1928 that the Swiss Bruno Trojani became the first ski jumper in Europe to soar more than 70 meters. A world record was set by Adolf Badrutt with a 75-meter jump in 1930. In 1948, the last competition took place but the 40-meter hill was still in use until the 1960s.

Skiing was already established in 1927 when Karl Gruber and partner Gregor Andreoli started making and selling skiing and mountaineering equipment in a small cabin on Via Maistra, the main street of Pontresina. Gruber Sport remains one of the region’s top outdoor equipment shops. Gruber’s son Erich took over the store in the 1960s, when he also was named head of the Pontresina ski school. Erich’s son Andy later assumed both roles.

In Switzerland in 1941, when the country was surrounded by Axis forces, the Swiss Army and Swiss tourism joined forces with a campaign to “help youth winter sports defend our borders.” This was more about eyes and ears looking out for the borders than outright military preparation. The very first Swiss Youth Ski Camp in Switzerland was held in Pontresina for 500 boys from “poor homes” while a similar camp was held for girls a year later, according to Michael Lutscher in his book, Snow, Sun and Stars.

The ski mountain Diavolezza is said to have received its name because a red-haired devil lived on the mountain. If nothing else, the story provided a memorable name and great devil logo. While the undulating treeless slopes still invite endless off-piste runs, access to the top was problematic for years. Plans for a funicular railway from Alp Bondo to Diavolezza or from Morteratsch through Munt Pers to the Diavolezza were floated in the 1920s. While the latter plan finally won favor in 1937, the financing fell through. Discussions resumed after the war. In 1954, the funicular idea was abandoned and a cable car was built from the valley to the top. Luftseilbahn Bernina-Diavolezza (LDB) began operating the 50-person cable car in 1956, but by the summer of 1958, it was necessary to add a larger, 62-person car. Meanwhile, a diesel-powered surface lift was built in the glacier in 1960. By 1980, a new 125-person cable car was opened.

While the 1928 and 1948 Winter Olympic Games in neighboring St. Moritz introduced the world to neighboring Pontresina, none of the medal events were held there. It does claim a footnote in Olympic lore, however. It was in Pontresina in 1948 that American skier Robert Lloyd “Barney” McLean, the captain of the U.S. Olympic Ski Team, skied several races one week before the Games began. In that January warm-up event, he took first in the downhill (Stein Eriksen came in second), third in slalom and first in combined. But in St. Moritz one week later, McLean fell in both the slalom and the downhill. He was quoted as saying afterwards, “I had run my race the week before.”

It was also in 1970 that “Club 8847—Piz Lagalb—Mount Everest” was founded. The club asked potential members to complete eleven ski runs from the Piz Lagalb, taking the Minor ski lift back up and then walking up to Piz Lagalb via a footpath and back again. If you could do this within one day, you were accepted as a member. The most famous member was the Shah of Iran, who passed the membership test in 1975 in the company of 19 bodyguards.

In a Swiss town that embraces the essence of winter, skiing is not the only pursuit in town. For more than a century, sport lovers have taken the funicular, built in 1907, up the peak of another mountain, nearby Muottas Muragl, for sledging (sledding) and tobogganing. The views from the top, beloved by painters and photographers, is a panorama overlooking the Upper Engadin Valley, from St. Moritz all the way to Italy.

Pontresina is also part of the second largest cross country ski race in the world, the Engadin Skimarathon, held every year on the second Sunday of March, between Maloja and S-chanf. The race debuted in 1969 and today welcomes upwards of 14,000 skiers annually on the 42 km race course, though some competitors choose to complete the half-marathon of 21 km that finishes in Pontresina.

As with St. Moritz and other Swiss resorts, some of the best graphic artists in the country were commissioned to create ski posters in the 20th century to advertise the resort. Arguably the best known was a now-iconic work by the Swiss artist Herbert Matter in 1935 simply called “Pontresina,” a bold photomontage of a skier wearing massive glacier goggles while another skier descends a steep piste in the background. The message seems to be that this village is not the lair of the idle rich of nearby St. Moritz but instead a place where the sport of skiing reigns supreme, an endeavor that requires skill and a sense of exploration. When you’re out on the vast white slopes of Diavolezza, that sentiment still rings true today. 

Everett Potter is a frequent contributor to Skiing History. He launched Everett Potter’s Travel Report in 2005 (everettpotter.com) and since then it has become one of the most widely read and respected digital sites in the travel industry.

Just a few miles from glitzy St. Moritz, the cultural heart of this Swiss ski region beats quietly in Pontresina. 

The history of the Swiss resort town of Pontresina is inextricably linked to its glamorous neighbor, St. Moritz, which lies five miles away. Pontresina has always played second fiddle to St. Moritz, which was the cradle of winter sports in Switzerland and hosted the Winter Olympics in 1928 and 1948. 

Today, St. Moritz is closer in spirit to Monaco, an outpost of the uber rich. But take a 10-minute drive along the Val Bernina, the high-altitude valley that branches off the Upper Engadin Valley, and you’ll discover the cultural heart of the region in Pontresina. Much smaller than its glamorous sibling, the town lies at 5,822 feet elevation and is laid out on a long ridge on the south-facing shelf of Alp Languard mountain. It is subtly elegant, and redolent of the Belle Epoque with its cobblestone streets and pastel-colored stucco houses. 

Many of these quaint buildings, which date back to the 17th century, are decked out in s’graffito, the stenciled plaster designs that are hallmarks of the region. The word itself is the origin of the term “graffiti” and the designs are of striking geometric patterns, fish, stars and whimsical beasts, along with sundials etched onto the sides of the homes. 

The locals greet each other not with “Gruezi,” the Swiss German greeting, but “Allegra,” which is how one says hello in Romansch, the Latin-based mountain language. Less than 70,000 people still speak Switzerland’s fourth language (after German, French and Italian) and Pontresina is a bastion of Romansch. If you paid attention in 10th grade Latin class, you will be amazed at how much you can decipher.

Pontresina offers astonishing panoramic views of nearby mountains, the Roseg Glacier and the pistes of Corviglia and Corvatsch that rise up behind St. Moritz. Surrounding this genteel, well-heeled town are pine and larch forests. It’s an alpine landscape that was be

loved by Italian-Swiss artist Giovanni Segantini, who spent much of his life painting it.

 The main ski areas of Pontresina are Lagalb and Diavolezza, the latter resembling a giant, undulating meringue and offering glacier skiing as early as October and running as late as May. Closer to Pontresina is the Morterasch Glacier, the largest glacier by area in the Bernina Range of the Bündner Alps. There’s a 10km route along the glacier from Diavolezza, the longest glacier ski in Switzerland. So famed was the glacier that it was painted in the 19th century by Albert Bierstadt and drawn by John Singer Sargent. But what once was an attraction for Victorian visitors is now a poster child for vanishing glaciers. It has retreated nearly two miles since the late 19th century and in the past few years, the Swiss have enlisted snow guns to try and save the glacier from melting further...

For six decades, West Mountain in upstate New York has been bringing skiers—and racers—into the sport. 

By Paul Post

Spencer and Sara Montgomery moved east to West Mountain, where they’re pursuing the adventure of a lifetime in his hometown of Queensbury, New York. They’ve given the Southern Adirondacks
resort a $17 million makeover since purchasing it in 2013, including three new chairlifts, 40,000 feet of snowmaking pipeline, 200 new snow guns, four groomers and a 500-foot lift for the tubing park. 

It’s quite a change for a couple who met on the Chicago trading floor and spent 10 years in Colorado, skiing at some of the world’s most famous resorts. 

West Mountain has been a family-oriented resort since the founding Brandt clan opened it on Christmas Day 1962. By installing lights for night skiing, they quickly attracted local curiosity seekers and developed a strong customer base throughout the region. The
Adirondack Northway (Interstate 87) opened in the early 1960s, providing a direct link from the Albany area, about an hour away. While small in size, with a 1,000-foot vertical drop, the center has made a big contribution to the sport.

“It’s a feeder mountain,” Spencer said. “I’m willing to bet that West Mountain has taught more people how to ski and is one of the top training mountains in the United States. We have 1,600 kids in after-school programs. That’s our history and our future.”

The site’s steep trails have hosted competitive racing since 1966, when Tom Jacobs and Isadore “Izzy” Ture founded the program (see “Remembering,” page 33). With on-mountain upgrades complete, the Montgomerys are now turning their attention to developing a full-time ski racing academy. One of their first moves was to hire Steve Lathrop, a former five-year World Cup competitor on the U.S. “A” Ski Team, who previously worked at Stratton Mountain School in southern Vermont. Lathrop is starting his third year as West Mountain’s alpine race director. 

A New Hampshire native, Lathrop learned how to ski on a rope tow built by his father, who served with the 10th Mountain Division during World War II. At one point, Lathrop was ranked 16th in the world in slalom. If not for injury, he would have gone to the 1972 Winter Olympics in Sapporo, Japan, so he knows what a good racing program needs and believes West Mountain has all the key elements.

In January 2020—prior to the COVID-19 shutdown—West Mountain hosted a four-day FIS event including two huge U-16 and U-19 races, with 225 racers each day from all over the East. A full slate of high school, masters and New York State Racing Association competition is on tap for the 2020–2021 season.

This fall, West Mountain also opened a brand-new ski racing academy that allows student-athletes to train 

full time. Those from outside the area, a half-dozen from western New York and New York City, take classes remotely through Queensbury High School or their own home school. Next year, plans call for having a full-fledged lodging component as well.

“The academy is for older kids who are able to live on their own and handle their studies and ski training,” Sara Montgomery says. “A lot of kids at that U-19 level drop out of ski racing because it becomes unaffordable for their families, with all of the travel and the high cost of equipment. This gives them the opportunity to continue racing at a competitive level at a more affordable rate.”

With good coaching and top-notch facilities, it might just be a matter of time before a West Mountain racer achieves international success. “I really believe this mountain has everything needed to develop world-class ski racers,” Lathrop says. 

When it opened in 1930, the Seigniory Club was the largest ski resort in Canada...and possibly in North America.

By Joseph Graham and Pierre Dumas

The historic Le Château Montebello, 50 miles east of Ottawa in the Outaouais region of western Quebec, claims to be the largest log structure in the world. That may or may not be true.  But while the architecture is impressive, the almost-forgotten ski history of the
hotel is legendary. 

Extensive research by the late Pierre Dumas, a retired engineer who won an ISHA Award for his work in identifying and cataloging every ski area and jump in the history of Quebec (Skiing History, July-August 2017), has revealed that when it opened in 1930 the Seigniory Club, as the complex was then called, was the largest ski and winter sports resort in Canada...and possibly in North America...

Built by architect Ralph Erskine, the Borgafjäll Hotel in Swedish Lapland is an enduring outpost of ski culture and solitude.

Not long ago, my friend Axel Persson and I embarked on a ski journey that took us north to Lapland—and back in time. Our destination was Borgafjäll, a remote mountain village in Swedish Lapland that’s home to Sami reindeer herders, a small lift-served ski area, extensive backcountry terrain, and a unique hotel and spa with an interesting history.

Above: Erskine built the hotel roof to be a ski slope, with a railing on three sides to prevent skiers from falling off. It opened in 1955.

Swedish Lapland, in the northernmost portion of the country, covers roughly 110,000 square kilometers and is home to only 94,000 people. That calculates to a population density below one person per square kilometer. It’s a place where skiers can still find a bit of elbow room while connecting with the sport’s heritage, which is rooted in solitude.

Our trip began in the city of Gothenburg on April 27, a lovely spring day in western Sweden. The forest near my home was a blanket of white, and the wood anemones were in full bloom. The girls that parade under those stately trees, walking daily along Gothenburg’s main avenue, had exchanged their winter wardrobes of black clothes and long overcoats for short dresses in spring pastels. When we arrived at our remote destination, the Lapland wilderness was also covered by white … but it was snow.

After taking the train to Stockholm, a local propeller plane flew us to Wilhelmina, a small settlement of 4,000 people in the province of Västerbotten. About 1,000 air kilometers north of our original Gothenburg starting point, the small aircraft touched down in a little clearing in the woods that they call an airport. From there, we borrowed a friend’s car and drove 112 kilometers northwest. Ninety minutes and a couple of reindeer herds later, we arrived at the Borgafjäll Hotel.

Here in southern Lapland, the pace of life is slow, small is good, and skiing never has been and never will be an “industry.” They say the Sami people have 100 different words to describe snow. I suspect they need no word for crowd, as the phenomenon does not exist.

A remote but enduring outpost of ski civilization, Borgafjäll has a unique history. Its tale begins in 1939, when architect Ralph Erskine was visiting Sweden from his native England. When World War II broke out during his stay, the pacifist Quaker decided to remain in neutral Sweden rather than return to the United Kingdom. Hence, Erskine’s early work was done primarily in his newly adopted homeland.

One of Erskine’s first significant achievements was the Hotel Borgafjäll, a fascinating piece of architecture that today still stands out as an iconic remnant of 1950s culture. Like the great Frank Lloyd Wright, Erskine sought to create harmony between his buildings and the surrounding environment. Not only did he build the hotel primarily from local materials, but he also built the roof to be a ski slope, with a railing on three sides to prevent skiers from falling off. Inside, sections of the hotel are connected by walkways that resemble ship’s gangways, while idiosyncratic fireplaces warm the lobby and dining room. The rooms are quirky, too: Many are laid out on three levels. The double room, for example, accommodates up to four people, with two single beds on the top level, sofa bed and TV on the central level, and bathroom below. A detached ski lodge has bunks and showers for budget-minded skiers.

Drawn by the hotel’s quirky reputation, skiers started to find their way to this remote Lapland outpost in the late 1950s. The pace picked up starting in 1962, when Erskine’s friend Arne Isaksson invested in a Weasel — a tracked military vehicle designed during World War II to move quickly over snowy terrain. For skiing purposes, it was the predecessor of the snow cat, and Arne used his Weasel to drag skiers up the slopes around the hotel.

Now 82, Arne is still around, and he reminisced with me about those pioneer days.

Skiing was growing in popularity in the early 1960s, and within a few years, he owned five Weasels, each driven by one of his brothers. Each Weasel could carry six passengers and haul an additional 25, each holding on for dear life to one of three ropes tied to the back.

Meanwhile, his wife was also active in this budding ski enterprise, serving waffles, sandwiches, sausages, coffee and soft drinks at a small hut on the slopes. The first surface lift was installed in 1967. Because it only took beginners about 165 vertical feet up the nearest slope, it didn’t provide much competition for Arne’s Weasels, which transported skiers about 1,300 vertical feet up the local mountains. When the first long T-bar was built in 1973, Arne retired his fleet.

Perhaps the most interesting bit of trivia regarding Arne’s early days is the manner in which he purchased the Weasels. He bought them from the U.S. Army, which had no use for them after the war.

“A lumber company bought such old military equipment per square kilometer,” Arne told me.

“Sorry, Arne. I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. “How can one buy a Weasel by the square kilometer?”

“Well,” the old timer drawled, “the lumber company negotiated a price for whatever old army vehicles were situated on one square kilometer of land. Everything remaining on that chunk of earth was theirs for that price. Later, the lumber company sold some of the equipment to me and others.”

While Ralph Erskine and Arne Isaksson have certainly left their legacy on the little ski area, an important person in today’s Borgafjäll is Magnus Nilsson. Magnus now owns the lifts and slopes, and at the time of my visit, he also ran a cat-skiing operation—a descendent of Arne’s Weasel business. Over the years, in addition to transporting skiers and boarders up the mountains with his snow cat, Magnus has also taken people off-piste with a chopper and guided them on touring skis.

When we arrived, the cat skiing had finished for the winter because the reindeer had begun to return to the mountains, but Magnus took some time to show Axel and me around. The ski area has two lifts. The longer and higher Borgalift, which serves a vertical drop of 950 vertical feet, is by far the more interesting. It has five pistes of differing gradients, all facing the picturesque Borga Lake and cliff-lined north face of Borgahällan (3,378 feet) on the opposite shore. The shorter Avasjö Lift and beginner lift on the east-facing side cater to families, but does access some nice off-piste tree skiing. After a trip to the sauna and four-star dinner of reindeer carpaccio and butter-fried whitefish, I slept like a baby.
 

The following day, we traveled by snowmobile with Magnus to the base of Klöverfjäll (4,273 feet), where we strapped skins to our skis and replaced the machines with manpower. As we skied, Magnus explained the long-running conflict between skiers and snowmobilers in Lapland. Nothing is more disturbing to a skier in search of solitude than a noisy machine cutting deep ruts through virgin snow. Meanwhile, snowmobilers want to race around the valleys without worrying about some errant skier who might end up as collateral damage. Magnus hoped his resort could be a melting pot where the two would coexist.

For the next few hours, we glided up through a moonscape of undulating white. The higher we skied, the farther the eye could see, and the panorama that unfolded as we approached the top was breathtaking.

Just under the summit, we paused for a short picnic. Near the peak, the wind had blasted the rocks with a coat of rime. It was early May, but the day was cold. Magnus had told us that the best time of day for corn snow would be between two and three o’clock in the afternoon, and he was right.

After our first few turns, the spring snow turned to the perfect texture. Little kernels riffled off our ski edges like a May hailstorm. Skiing corn is so effortless that one hardly requires a pause, and before we knew it, we were back at the snowmobiles, gazing up at our tracks that glistened in the sunshine. Later, sitting by the pool, I reflected on the common ground that skiers and snowmobilers share. Sure, snowmobiles are noisy and leave a trail of exhaust in the air that I can’t avoid breathing as I glide silently uphill to my destination. Both sports, however, share a love of speed, a sense of freedom, and a desire for communion with nature.

And then I remembered Ralph Erskine and the reindeer. They are the rightful rulers of this territory. They, too, want to roam freely in the mountains. Magnus had recently compromised his financial interests and shut down his snow cat operation for the season in deference to the return of the herds to higher ground. It was all about respect. 

American-born writer Jimmy Petterson has produced 15 ski films and written and photographed Skiing Around the World, Volumes 1 and 2. See www.skiingaroundtheworldbook.com.

Thousands learned to ski at the Borscht Belt hotels of New York's Catskill Mountains.

Starting in the early 1950s, hundreds of thousands of Americans learned to ski not on the slopes of major resorts like Sun Valley, Stowe or Aspen, but at more prosaic ski areas and resort hotels with names like Big Vanilla at Davos, the Concord, Gibber’s, the Granit, Grossingers, Homowack Lodge, Kutsher’s, Laurels, the Nevele, the Pines and the Raleigh. These were among the Borscht Belt hotels in the Catskills, about 90 miles northwest of New York City.

The Borscht Belt—named for a sweet-and-sour beet soup associated with immigrants from eastern Europe—identifies the show-biz culture that arose from Yiddish theater and spawned comedians such as Lenny Bruce, Red Buttons, Sid Caesar, Billy Crystal, Buddy Hackett, Danny Kaye, Carl Reiner and Jerry Stiller. They honed their stand-up acts in the region also affectionately nicknamed the Sour Cream Sierras (sweet red borscht was often served with a dollop of sour cream), or even the Jewish Alps.

The resorts became fictional locations for movies like Dirty Dancing and A Walk on the Moon, and TV shows like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, although some were actually shot at look-alike resorts in Virginia, North Carolina or the Adirondacks.

“From the early ’50s up to the early ’70s, the area’s hotels were a haven for upwardly mobile Jewish families who came year-round to eat prodigious amounts of food and chortle at comedians like Jerry Lewis who defined their era,” says Steve Cohen, who wrote lively articles about the Catskills for SKI in 2000 and 2006.

Legendary New York Times snowsports journalist Michael Strauss wrote in SKI in January 1960 (subsequently reprinted in “Borscht, Bagels and Bindings,” Skiing Heritage, December 2000) that “The Catskills were the Alps of mid-coast, middle-class Americans on ski vacations in the mid-20th century.”

He credits Swiss-born instructor Tino Koch for taking “dime-sized beginner’s areas and turning out hundreds of polished beginners yearning for the more trying slopes of upper New York State and New England.”

For me, it was my boyhood home. Living just a few miles from tiny Holiday Mountain was a dream come true for me, although not so much for drivers who had to contend with machine-made snow drifting onto the adjacent Route 17. Holiday offered only a 400-foot vertical, but I remember the glee of endlessly yo-yoing its narrow white-gauze-bandage runs, riding a Poma and two slow double chairs on weekends and Wednesday evenings after school. I was part of a local vacation attraction that dated back almost 100 years.

SKIING BEFORE THE WAR

Beginning in 1936, Liberty Winter Sports operated the Walnut Mountain rope tow in Liberty, on the site of the now-demolished Walnut Mountain House. Skiers brought refreshments in knapsacks and sunned, like lizards, atop a boulder, according to the CD-ROM Liberty, NY: Memories, produced by Between The Lakes Group (Taconic, Connecticut). In the era before snowmaking, Walnut Mountain depended on natural snowfall. With World War II, and the departure of its male skiers to war, Walnut closed.

October 1948 saw the launch of Christmas Hills in Livingston Manor, now a partially gentrified second home community in the northern part of Sullivan County. According to Sullivan County historian John Conway, writing for the New York Almanack, Christmas Hills had a lot going for it, and there were high hopes for its success. Conway quotes Jeffersonville’s Sullivan County Record (October 21, 1948): “During its first season of operation Christmas Hills will be open every weekend, except during the holiday season when a daily schedule will take effect. It will provide two of the latest type electric ski tows, varied slopes, including alternate ski trails through the woods and a professional ski school.”

The Republican Watchman reported the next day, “There will be the added feature of ‘ski-joring’—the use of a horse for level towing on skis—is planned (sic) as an added thrill for the fast growing ski public.

“The Christmas Hills slopes compare favorably with the best on the Eastern Seaboard. More than 1,500 feet long, the main ski run varies in rise from 30 degrees for the ski expert to a mild 10 to 15 degrees for beginners. Snow conditions should be ideal over a long period and the southern exposure of the slopes afford an exceptionally beautiful setting.”

Conway writes, “Just as it had with the Walnut Mountain ski hill a decade before, the lack of snow prevented Christmas Hills from ever becoming as successful as it might have been.”

The Concord Hotel in nearby Kiamesha Lake has claimed to be the first ski area to make its own snow (that honor belongs to Mohawk Mountain, which installed Wayne Pierce’s new snow gun in 1950). But the Concord was certainly the first ski area to blow pink and blue snow. Michael Strauss of the New York Times reported that the dye used to color Concord snow badly stained the pants and sweaters of beginners who fell in it.

By 1958, Conway wrote, the hotel was operating an Austrian-manufactured T-bar capable of transporting 460 skiers per hour. Vertical drop was 139 feet.

“At Grossinger’s, before snowmaking equipment was installed in 1952, it was a common practice to physically move as much snow as possible from the hotel’s extensive property to the ski area in order to accommodate the skiers,” Conway wrote. “It was not a foolproof plan, and only occasionally provided satisfactory results.” They also experimented with a surface of ground-up plastic collar buttons.

In the late 1950s, Holiday Mountain Ski Area in Bridgeville was fully operational and billed itself as the closest ski area of its kind to New York City.

“It will be no layout to captivate the imagination of experts accustomed to tearing down Stowe’s Nosedive or Mount Greylock’s Thunderbolt, but it will more than suffice for the run-of-the-mill sports lover who wants to test his legs as well as enjoy the sport with a minimum risk of injury,” predicted Michael Strauss in the New York Times on December 8, 1957.

According to Conway’s book, Remembering the Sullivan County Catskills (History Press, 2008), “Holiday Mountain continued to improve its operation over the next several years, and managed to survive the opening of the larger and better equipped Davos in Woodbridge in 1959, as well as the advent and expansion of other ski hills, including the nearby Columbia and the Pines, which, in 1965, became the first hotel to feature a chairlift.”

By 1960, Holiday Mountain was facing stiff competition. There were numerous Sullivan County hotels offering skiing, along with ice skating, tobogganing, endless games of Simon Sez, and the attraction of all-you-can-eat meals. Yet today, Holiday is the county’s only stand-alone ski area, helped in part by reinventing itself as a Ski and Fun Park.

Frozen in Time

Barry Levinson, 59, is a 40-year veteran of the ski industry who teaches part-time at Vail. He was born in Monticello, the county seat of Sullivan County, where he lived for 18 years—in fact, next door to me. We sledded and skied on the hill between our homes. Last summer he returned to the southern Catskills to document the lost ski areas of his youth.

His Catskill Skiing History page on Facebook documents the remains of dozens of Borscht Belt ski areas. One photo shows a solitary cableless bullwheel at the remains of Big Vanilla at Davos, where at its prime, a waiter in the base lodge would warm your hot toddys with a glowing poker. There are images of chairlifts rotting into the ground and a vintage snowcat stored in a shed with mechanic tools nearby. A YouTube video of Nevele Resort shows skis strewn in the base lodge. A sign offers $20 group
and $60 private lessons (see https://tinyurl.com/neveleruins).

In a recent call with Skiing History, Levinson likened abandoned Catskill ski hills to Chernobyl. “It’s totally frozen in time,” he said. “A post apocalyptic scene. It’s depressing as hell, but fascinating…I documented these lost ski areas out of a sense of nostalgia. Growing up in the Catskills when I was a kid was a nice place to be,” he says.

“While I thought Holiday Mountain was too small, I realized in the grand scheme of things we were lucky to have it. What else would we have done up there in the winter?”

Southern Catskill hotel skiing failed to prosper into the 21st century, with the exception of a small still-operating hill at the Italian-American Villa Roma Resort in Callicoon. Nonetheless, as Michael Strauss wrote in SKI, “there are tens of thousands of Americans skiing today on bigger, better mountains, thanks partly to the early chutzpah of Catskill hoteliers.”

ISHA vice president Jeff Blumenfeld is president of the North American Snow-sports Journalists Association (NASJA.org) and author of Travel With Purpose: A Field Guide to Voluntourism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). Learn more at travelwithpurposebook.com.