“Searching for Vermont’s Lost Ski Areas, Part II” opened on Friday at the Vermont Ski and Snowboard Museum in Stowe. The exhibit looks back at more than 100 defunct downhill ski areas in central and northern Vermont. Part I, displayed last year — and on view in condensed form this year — features the bygone ski hills south of Route 4.
Exhibit curator Poppy Gall and her team of volunteer researchers have discovered a total of 184 “lost” ski areas so far, and their quest continues. Along with vintage photos, a smattering of signs and a section of rope from an old Stowe tow, the exhibit displays succinct descriptions of the ski areas and asks viewers: Do you know more?
“I’m sure there’s a lot of people that know a lot more than we do about a lot of this stuff, and we’d love to know more,” Gall said. (Anyone with information can submit it on the museum’s website.)
Ski areas highlighted this year include four in Waterbury, five in Stowe and one along Williston Road in South Burlington, behind what is now the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel. The South Burlington Kiwanis Club built the slope, which had a 400-foot vertical drop lined with novice, intermediate and expert trails. It opened in February 1963, closed for two seasons due to lack of snow, and reopened in January 1966 — only to close permanently the following year, after a fire and vandals destroyed much of its equipment.
While the exhibition is thin on artifacts — mom-and-pop ski areas typically didn’t issue lift tickets or sell merch — it is rich with stories. Vermont is home to the first ski lift in the country: a rope tow powered by a Ford Model T engine installed in 1934 on Gilbert’s Hill in Woodstock.
For years, determined Vermonters climbed or skied up mountains just for the chance to schuss down. The practice was popular in Barton for two decades before 1961, when community groups and individual donors chipped in money, time and equipment to install a rope tow on Hugh Wakeman’s land. The Barton Ski Club formed to operate it. Lights strung from telephone poles allowed night skiing, and Barton Village donated the electricity. Skiing was free, though donations were encouraged: “Give us your dough to fund the tow,” read a sign next to a donation box.
Barre Skyline Ski Area, which operated from 1957 to 1969, also offered night skiing, in addition to jumps, lessons, a ski patrol, first aid and a lodge. But it retained small-hill charm. “Local skiers remember that the area to stop at the end of a ski run was very short before hitting a fence,” the exhibit explains.
In 1962, S.D. Ireland Companies founder Stuart Ireland moved to Stowe and built the Town and Country Motor Lodge, now known as Outbound Stowe. Utilizing his construction background, he built a slope with a 30-foot vertical drop behind the resort and installed a T-bar. He trucked in snow from northern New York and Canada one year when nature didn’t provide. And he stirred a little controversy, according to the exhibit, when he started the Sno Bunny Club, a staff of female servers who wore costumes with cotton tails.
The hilly pasture behind Henry Dike’s East Charlotte barn became much more popular with local kids in 1956, when Dike and a buddy cobbled together a rope tow. Powered by a five-horsepower engine, it snaked through six pulleys and could pull up four people at a time — if they didn’t stand too close together.
In Montpelier, ski lovers installed a community rope tow behind the Vermont College campus on a slope called Sabin’s Pasture. It opened in 1945. As the late Grant Reynolds recalled on an exhibit placard, the engine of a 1937 Plymouth, running in first gear, powered the tow. “We experimented with third gear when things were dull and some of our rowdy acquaintances were riding it,” Reynolds said. The hill closed around 1982.
A variety of factors forced the ski areas in the exhibit to fold: the cost of liability insurance or upgrades needed to meet state safety standards; advances in equipment that made skis perform better and small mountains less fun; and lack of snow.
Dike’s Pasture in East Charlotte closed for a simpler reason: The neighborhood kids grew up.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Stowe Museum Spotlights Vermont’s ‘Lost’ Ski Areas”
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This article appears in Dec 11-17, 2024.
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