Digging into a “lost” ski area is a bit like going on a treasure hunt.
“That’s the fun part. You have to dig, dig,” said Poppy Gall, who’s the treasurer hunter (read: curator) of the new “Searching for Vermont’s Lost Ski Areas” exhibit, which opened last Friday at the Vermont Ski and Snowboard Museum in Stowe.
Gall — who sits on the museum’s board of directors — sifted through old newspaper archives and brochures to assemble the list of more than 180 lost-to-time ski areas from every corner of Vermont — including Snow Valley, in Winhall, where Gall got her own ski legs as a kid.
Ski areas in the southern half of the state were the focus of an exhibit last year, which served as a part one; the new exhibit takes on the rest. In the last year, Gall and her team of “sleuths,” as she calls them, have made some big discoveries about people and places she thought she knew so well — like Brad and Janet Mead, who started Pico.
"The year before they started Pico, they had this Fra-Mar Farm, little ski area, in Mendon, and we never knew about it,” Gall said. “To learn through a newspaper and in the Rutland Herald that they had started this ski area … I mean, that just felt like such a win.”
Vermont owes its ski area history to the rope tow, and the enthusiasts who built one using an old Model T engine on a farmer’s land in Woodstock. Areas multiplied after World War II, when troops from the 10th Mountain Division returned home with a renewed sense of enthusiasm for the sport.
Gall said each ski area — kept alive by donations, in money and in willpower— was like the “community swimming pool” of its town.
“You could drop your kid off at the tow and give him a quarter for hot chocolate and, or two hot chocolates, and just leave them,” she said.
The number of areas peaked in the mid-1960s. In the '70s, the boom came to a grinding halt — partly due to a phenomenon that is familiar to the skiers of today: variable winters. Gall said skiers also got bored of the rope tows and bunny hills and expected more. Liability insurance became a very expensive necessity. And, another nail in the coffin: the state of Vermont started doing safety checks.
“So when the safety guy comes and says, 'Oh, you can't run this,' and they can't afford to make the changes because they've got a tin can at the bottom of the lift that says donations—” she trailed off with a shrug.
Skiing is a completely different beast now. The business is dominated by big, multinational corporations like Alterra and Vail — which, together, own a quarter of the mountains here, in Vermont. (Most of the others are independent, and some, like Cochran’s and Northeast Slopes, still operate on that community-funded model that the “lost” areas did back in the day.)
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Standing in front of the map of all 180-plus areas at the museum, just a few miles away from one of Vermont’s most popular, corporate-owned mountains, it’s hard not to feel a tinge of nostalgia for the way things used to be.
And while Gall said she’ll always love the sport — the thrill of being warm and cold at the same time, the joy of being what she calls “one with the snow” — she does feel that things are different now.
“Everything's smooth,” she said. “All the edges are smoothed out.”
At least, as far as she's concerned, they won’t be forgotten.
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