Lost: Buckturd Basin Ski Area. Last seen: 1990. Reward for finding: If you see it, ski it.
Misplacing a ski area seems nearly impossible, given their typically lofty profile and the schussers and shredders dotting the landscape.
But in the case of “Searching for Vermont’s Lost Ski Areas,” a new exhibit at the Vermont Ski and Snowboard Museum in Stowe, “lost” refers not to “gone missing — call the hounds” but rather to the scores of Vermont sites that have shut their slopes over the years. The evocatively named Buckturd, for instance, was a privately run facility in West Townshend featuring a rope tow and a vertical drop of 350 feet. After a decade of making memories — but not snow — Buckturd is now among the lost.
Vermonters once skied Freak Peak, Hedgehog Hovel and Brushwood-by-Bradford, a moniker straight out of England’s Cotswolds.
The Green Mountain State has a lengthy and proud skiing history dating back to the 1930s. As such, it has lost more ski areas than most states have ever had, and the museum’s new exhibition celebrates these ghosts. Twenty years of research has uncovered a staggering 175 defunct downhills throughout the state, according to curator Poppy Gall. Some 70 of these were located in southern Vermont between the Massachusetts border and Route 4 and are featured in the first stage of the show; the second, focused on northern Vermont, will follow at a later date.
The centerpiece of “Searching for Vermont’s Lost Ski Areas” is a large map locating the lost areas — defined as having had a community tow or multiple lifts — as well as the ones that died and were revived. What was lost, too, were some classic names. Besides Buckturd, Vermonters once skied Freak Peak, Hedgehog Hovel and Brushwood-by-Bradford, a moniker straight out of England’s Cotswolds.
The vast majority of the lost areas are not of the Sugarbush or Bolton Valley category; they are mom-and-pop backyard bumps that operated with a rope tow and a prayer. Bill Jenkins built one in 1951 at Green Mountain College in Poultney — a perfect bunny hill with a vertical drop of 31 feet, 6.5 inches. It operated for 28 years.
The sites were identified through photos and memorabilia in the museum’s collection, historical records, and local knowledge. One such source was Jeremy Davis, who has written a series of books on abandoned ski areas in New England, New York’s Adirondack Mountains and the Berkshires in Massachusetts. Davis attended Lyndon State College (now part of Vermont State University).
“I’d go to antique shops and find old ski brochures,” Davis said. “I used to buy a ton of stuff on eBay.”
On the evening of December 1, Davis was among the invited guests at the exhibition opening. Outside, rain morphed into puffy snowflakes, adding to the town’s snow-globe appeal. Inside, the 40 or so attendees were mostly locals who wore the weathered clothes and visages of an outdoor life.
U.S. Ski & Snowboard Hall of Famer Jan Reynolds and ski historian Greg Morrill, both of Stowe, were among the guests who viewed vintage posters, signage and other memorabilia from pistes of the past. The exhibition numbers the lost ski areas and includes a brief description of each, highlighting several in greater detail.
Hogback Mountain Ski Area opened in 1947 in Marlboro and had a lot going for it, including a fantastic view from an overlook on Route 9 (the Molly Stark Highway). By the late 1950s, Hogback was seeing as many as 1,200 skiers on weekends. Unfortunately, it was the first Vermont ski area to close, in 1986, due to increased liability insurance costs. That fact was emphasized by several vintage signs in the exhibition, all of which conveyed basically the same message: “Whatever happens here is your fault!”
Apart from the ruinous cost of liability insurance, what other factors cause ski areas to go belly-up? “Sometimes it’s one big reason, then there’s a lot of little reasons that can kind of add up,” Davis explained. “So the main reason could be [a lack of] snowmaking, which was expensive then, and it’s even more expensive now.”
Davis and Gall ticked off other hill-killers: aging or nonexistent infrastructure; changing vacation habits due to new interstate highways; changing family dynamics, resulting in fewer group getaways; and competition from other winter activities, such as hockey, ice fishing and skating.
Still, some failures seem inexplicable. Snow Valley in Winhall opened in 1941 and was one of the largest facilities in the East, featuring a 900-foot vertical drop, a rare T-bar lift, two rope tows and six trails. The area added snowmaking in the early 1980s and hosted the first National Snowboarding Championships in 1983. It shut down in 1984 when larger, more sophisticated facilities drew skiers away.
Mount Ascutney, meanwhile, was lost but then found. A ski club cut trails on the southwest side of the Brownsville mountain in 1936. Then came a lodge, four tows and night skiing. In 1956, it added the first snowmaking system and more lifts, including a chairlift in 1963. But it went bankrupt three times between 1963 and 2010 and was sold four times.
Ascutney was reborn as a community area in 2016, when the Town of West Windsor purchased it with a land trust agreement to conserve the upper part of the mountain. The nonprofit Ascutney Outdoors now operates a rope tow and a T-bar and allows backcountry access to the top of the mountain for skiing and snowboarding.
Gall said she had high hopes that the exhibition would trigger some memories and produce more memorabilia from a bygone era, a time when a thick rope and a generator were the building blocks of a skier’s dream.
“The people who are really going to remember this stuff are fewer and fewer,” Gall said. “So it’s really a call to those people who know about these places. Do they have any artifacts? What can they share with us? I think that’s going to be the fun part of the exhibit — what else do we learn?”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Vertical Dropouts | A new exhibition highlights Vermont’s lost ski areas”
This article appears in Dec 13-19, 2023.
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