The Ski Journal - Volume 16, Issue 1
LOST AND FOUND: The New England Lost Ski Area Project
Words: José da Silva 2022-09-09 14:18:00
Photo: NELSAP Archives
The metal shelves in Jeremy Davis’ garage near Saratoga Springs, NY, are cluttered with paper bags, plastic bins and old file boxes. Between those two five-shelf units are two more filing cabinets, three drawers each. These repositories house Davis’ primary sources, the base texts that eventually populate New England Lost Ski Area Project (nelsap.org), an online record of New England’s defunct ski areas.
In the late ’90s, Davis, then a student at Lyndon State College (now part of Northern Vermont University), began NELSAP’s website to document all the closed, destroyed and defunct ski hills in New England. It wasn’t for class credit. “No one told me to do it,” Davis says. “It was just something I was interested in.”
The website hasn’t changed much two decades later. It is festooned with casual orange and yellow sans serif typefaces set against a black background, a not-so-stylistic preservation of an early internet aesthetic. To date, the neon typefaces document over 600 now-closed ski areas of varying degrees of obscurity, areas that might otherwise be lost to aging analog history. The project has also expanded beyond its initial bailiwick, including the timelines of more than 80 areas in New York, New Jersey, Quebec, Colorado, Washington, Germany and Afghanistan.
Davis works full time as an assistant director of operations for a private maritime forecasting company and also serves on the board of the New England Ski Museum; he was the youngest person ever to be appointed as a board member at 22 years old. He devotes less time to NELSAP now than he used to, and roughly 50 mountains wait patiently on his shelves, and have yet to be added to the website. Still he refuses to move on. “I feel like a steward,” he says. “I just love this project so much. It has connected me to so many interesting people and places. It’s a project that, just by its nature, can never be finished.” On the shelves, files are organized by year and region. In the King Ridge file—a former New Hampshire ski area that opened in 1961 with a T-bar and 500 vertical feet—are eight different brochures, three trail maps, a King Ridge “game board,” an entertainment guide, lift-ticket pricing from the 1986-87 season, and the 1993-94 staff manual. Poured out and spread across the floor is a life’s work, a portrait of a hill that started catering to a younger, more beginner skier before it was sold in 1995.
Davis’ research preserves even the most obscure narratives. In 1958, Roger Picard established a small private rope tow in the Berkshires he called Thunderbolt Mountain. It closed three weekends in, after Picard’s arm was pulled into the towrope machinery. “I traced him, tracked him down, and talked to him on the phone,” Davis says. “He tells me, ‘No one has asked me about that ski area for more than 60 years. Thank you so much for doing that.’”
Despite the historical nature of the project, Davis and his website are as rooted in the present and future as they are in the past. As large resorts squeeze the market, Davis’ documentation can serve as a road map for smaller ski areas looking to survive, pointing to both what went wrong or changed during a time when hundreds of New England ski areas came and went.
Mike Beebe’s family legacy sits in one of Davis’ neat files. Beebe’s parents opened Temple Mountain in 1937, and after he graduated from University of New Hampshire he ran the mountain (which only opened on the weekends) until 1995. By 2001 the hill had shuttered for good.
Beebe believes contemporary skiing evolved, for better or worse, from the eras before it. His family and other mountains of the time had to hire lawyers to navigate liability, learn how to thread towropes so that people didn’t get hurt, figure out how to pack snow and learn how to rate trails based on difficulty and pitch—hands-on stories that seem unimaginable in today’s hyper-conglomerated ski world. Now Davis’ maintenance of that history ensures that skiing’s grassroots progression will never disappear. “I’m going to die sometime, or get dementia or whatever,” Beebe says. “But the story, our story, will live on.”
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