The Ski Journal - Volume 14, Issue 3
PODUNK POWDER: A Journey Through Skiing’s Rural Soul
Words, Photos and Captions: Matthew Tufts 2020-12-09 17:49:49
Kaya, cat operator Robin Cecioni’s wolf-dog mix, keeps an eye on nighttime operations during one of Shames Mountain Ski Area’s biggest dumps of the season.
You wanna know what Fergi’s all about? We take white trash and we turn ’em into skiers.”
Years of cold mountain air and cigarettes layered Tim Turrentine’s raspy voice with the crackle of a transistor radio. An unseasonably warm breeze picked up his long hair and wafted smoke across the deck of Terminal Gravity, a small brewery 25 minutes from Ferguson Ridge Ski Area in Joseph, OR.
“And that’s another thing,” Tim continued, as much to himself as to me or anyone else on the patio that could hear. “It’s a Ski. Area.” He enunciated each word and let out another snort. “I always laugh when they call Fergi a resort, like it has a golf course and accommodations and all that. We have a T-bar!” He laughed some more, which turned into a hacking cough.
I had heard about Fergi the only way anyone really hears about the small ski area at the northern foothills of the Wallowa Mountains—through a local. At least a couple hundred convoluted miles from anywhere, situated on a dead-end gravel road, it’s not particularly easy to find, and the people here don’t go out of their way to change that.
Joseph and the neighboring town of Enterprise tally a cumulative population near 3,500 residents. Tourism and agriculture are the primary economic drivers, but the region is a distinctly seasonal destination. Rolling into town in late December, I had the only vehicle with out-of-state plates. Still, my 1986 Ford fit right in. There aren’t many new Tacomas this side of Bend.
A handwritten sign downtown informed locals that the ski area was open for the weekend, despite a recent warm spell. A handful of arid farm-laden miles gave way to bumpy gravel and relics of a fading timber industry as I pulled into the muddy lot. Across the way, Fergi’s solitary rope tow hummed its early winter tune to a lot vacant but for a handful of disinterested dogs.
Amid a squall of mega-resort conglomeration and real-estate-development-fueled expansion, ski operations such as Fergi can feel like little more than a single swirling dendrite in a $20 billion ski industry blizzard. These hills are scattered across the country in rural locales where the land is too flat, the population too small, the average income too low and the snow too unreliable to merit a resort. These are, as Tim put it, ski areas. And their place in a rapidly growing industry is uncertain.
As the ski industry continues to accelerate toward commercialization and opulence, it has left rural ski areas with vague instructions: adapt or fade away. But as evidenced by my homeland hills in Vermont’s Green Mountains, in eastern Oregon’s quiet Wallowas, and as far away as British Columbia’s Northern Coast Range, these community hills form the essential down-home roots of our sport.
A handful of skiers bustled out of the wooden ski shop and ski patrol building. The structure was reminiscent of sugaring huts back in Vermont, its signs hand-painted in red on weathered plywood. One of the shacks was a converted chicken coop.
A telemarking ski patroller carved down to the group with a bundle of recently cleared deadfall branches in her arms, describing the thin conditions as “homey” to Jerry Hustafa, a man with a graying beard and matching ponytail. He wore tattered Carhartts cuffed above tele boots and grabbed me a wicket. Jerry was the mountain manager—for the day. Like all positions at Fergi, operations run on a rotating and volunteer basis.
Fergi doesn’t sell season passes. They sell lifetime ski club memberships. Five hundred dollars buys a family lifetime membership with $100 yearly dues; individual lifetime membership runs $250 plus $50 annually. The sums can be paid over affordable installments. There’s a kicker though: Each pass holder is responsible for “four days [each year] of helping out, catching tees, taking tickets, watching the top of the hill,” according to Charlie Kissinger, the former president of the Eagle Cap Ski Club. The club has managed operations on the north side of the Wallowa Mountains since the late 1930s. Most people volunteer well beyond their four required days.
Fergi’s hippie pow-farming commune may not feel at home at a podunk hill in a traditionally conservative corner of the West, but it’s a narrative Fergi embraces with equal parts enthusiasm and irony. Bumper stickers and T-shirts emblazoned with “Fergi: Peace on Earth” reference Fergi’s conspicuous peace sign trail design. The hill’s other motto is slightly more colorful: “Ski Fergi: Where Two Inches Feels Like Six.”
I shared an early T bump with another volunteer, Mike Hamman. He keeps the original 1960s Doppelmayr running, his grease-stained jacket and wool pile pants a reprieve from the breathable Gore-Tex and 800-fill down puffies I saw the week prior in Tahoe. Later we visited his shop, strewn with spring boxes and parts for resurrecting the diesel generator. The radio squawked something about the T-bar. “It’s a temporary fix. It’ll last a few days, get us through the holidays.” The local kids were on winter break and the hill was expected to get busier.
Next door, Charlie’s rental shop was crammed with nostalgic mementos of Eagle Cap Ski Club and Fergi’s joint history. An enormous cream-colored Akbash lounged in the rare floor space between the woodstove and stacks of skis. Charlie’s long hair dropped out of a faded baseball cap. His weathered look was accentuated by scraggly whiskers, youthful eyes and a grandfatherly smile. I watched him set up a full rental for less cost than a burger at most resorts. At Fergi, profit isn’t the point.
“When I grew up in the Portland area, skiing was kind of an elitist thing,” Charlie told me. “So, I didn’t start skiing myself until my early 30s when I came here and got involved with this and these people. It was fun—it was something that the whole community was doing as opposed to just the rich kids.”
Behind the dog I could make out a thank you note taped to his desk signed by dozens of local youth. “For some low-income families, it’s still pretty hard to ski, but we do a lot,” Charlie continued. “[The ski club] has programs where we bring up busloads of kids that basically get to ski for free. We help them learn, let them ride the rope tow, give them stuff to ski on. People probably can’t afford to ski anywhere else, but they can ski here.”
Five years ago, Fergi’s private landowners (who are also members of the club) donated the land to the Lions Club under the provision that the club would continue to manage operations. “So now they own the property and we use Lions Club insurance—that’s our loophole,” Charlie said with a smirk.
Typically, the highest operational expenditure for small ski areas, rising insurance costs can make or break a hill. By relinquishing all legal responsibility to a well-funded international organization, Eagle Cap freed up valuable energy and capital to focus on the only two things really required to keep the hill in operation: generating enough revenue to pay for diesel and snowcat repairs, and keeping the dilapidated T-bar running. Rules aren’t expected to be strictly enforced in a libertarian-leaning western locale (see their “no dogs” signs)—but legally, it keeps the club free of the sort of petty lawsuits that could bankrupt a small ski operation.
“We have an uphill policy, too; it’s clearer than our no dogs policy,” Charlie said, looking down at his dog and handing back my skis. He suggested I take a few downhill laps before throwing skins on the new wax job.
I took a few laps—slush on day one and cold-front-sponsored coral ice on day two. Charlie asked how it was. I told him I loved the community; the skiing was, well, marginal. He laughed and shrugged. “We resist attempts to flatter us. We’re not pretending to be anything else.”
Mount Ascutney, a monadnock in Vermont’s Upper Valley, towers above my childhood home of Windsor County. The peak’s northwest flanks have seen a variety of commercial ski operations over the past 80 years, but in 2010 my hometown lifts went silent. After floating through bankruptcy multiple times over the past couple of decades, most were convinced it would not be resuscitated. Dozens of jobs were lost, tourism was stifled, and the future of the small village of Brownsville hung in the balance.
Skiing on Ascutney didn’t start with grand plans to develop a resort to compete with nearby behemoths Killington and Okemo. “With the parade of Wall Street strangers who have come and gone at Ascutney over the years, investing and losing many tens of millions of dollars in the process, it’s difficult to recall what a small operation Ascutney was in the mid-1950s,” recalled late local businessman John Howland in his book, Ventures and Adventures: The Memoirs of a Vermont Businessman. “The assets consisted of a small lodge (what we called a warming hut) on leased land, three rope tows and some miscellaneous equipment. But it also included the interest and will of the parents of a hundred children in the surrounding towns.”
Howland is widely applauded for his efforts to develop Ascutney with the community in mind. He achieved this through a particularly novel idea at the time—season tickets.
“Our ski area promotion was aimed at manufacturing skiers, not just attracting them from elsewhere,” Howland wrote. That started with incentivizing locals. “We allowed students who were short of cash to work out their season ticket by packing out our two trails and the main slope.” With these promotions, the mountain developed a season ticket group of local people that numbered more than 1,000 by the time Howland left the ski area in 1965. (For context, today the village of Brownsville has a population of about 500.)
“While the ski area was too large to call a family-run business, it was run by local families, for local families.” —John Howland
Local investment in Ascutney included an early semblance of cooperative structure with locals owning cheap shares of the mountain operation. Howland detailed the shoestring business, swapping “stock for virtually all the ingredients required to cook up a 1950s-style ski area: lumber, roofing, bulldozing, cement, furniture, diesel, tractor, signs and photography. Just add snow.”
Under Howland’s watch, Ascutney expanded in size, but never outgrew its familial roots. “While the ski area was too large to call a family-run business, it was run by local families, for local families, and it’s not much of a stretch to say the community of regular workers and regular skiers in the 1950s became one big family,” Howland wrote. “In short, we had hundreds of regular customers who felt that the place belonged to them—and that they belonged to Ascutney.”
Unfortunately, the utopian, community-backed ski area came crashing down multiple times over the next several decades after Howland’s departure. Out-of-state investors without ski industry experience or local connections poured millions of dollars into developing real estate and high-speed lift infrastructure while diminishing local value.
“The [new] owners wanted Windsor High School to restart the ski team, but they didn’t have any interest in giving the student athletes passes to ski,” explained Bob Hingston, a former longtime athletic director for the local high school over a greasy diner breakfast. “It didn’t make sense; how do you not make that investment in the young people, in the next generation?” In its early years, Mt. Ascutney Ski Area developed world-class local skiers under the guidance of WHS ski coach Mickey Cochran, whose children went on to win Olympic gold.
After the resort’s demise in the 2000s, much of the infrastructure was auctioned off and the assets were liquidated. While many believed the clean slate spelled the end of skiing at Ascutney, a local grassroots contingent saw it as an opportunity to start from scratch and return to their roots.
“The tipping point for this whole thing was the foreclosure of Ascutney Mountain Resort in 2009,” said Glenn Seward, a former mountain manager at the resort. “That was really the end of big commercial skiing here. And, in many ways, I think the town lost its identity. It was a ski town since back in the 1940s—it was the economic driver for West Windsor but also the nucleus for the social scene. When all that dried up and the lifts were taken off the mountain, we were left with just an empty feeling, not knowing where things would go at that point. Both [my wife] Shelly and I felt that, structured properly, some sort of small ski operation could work here.”
That sustainable business model was birthed from an amalgamation of local, nonprofit and crowd-sourced funding, which spanned contributions of several dollars to single donations of many thousands of dollars. Through a collaboration with the Trust for Public Land, the town select board (with guidance from Glenn and Shelly) moved to purchase and preserve the land around the former resort. The town hall meeting to facilitate the transfer was one of the most-attended forums in the rural community’s history, resulting in a landslide approval. The parcel abutted the existing West Windsor Town Forest property, expanding its tenure to nearly 2,000 acres of public land complete with biking, hiking and, finally, ski trails. In essence, the town bought its ski hill.
Contrary to its predecessors, the operation now carries very little debt. The town owns the land, Ascutney Outdoors—a local nonprofit advocate for recreation and conservation—handles recreational management of the area through volunteers and a local donor base, and capital investments in its (limited) infrastructure have already been paid off. Following a couple years of local efforts to brush the existing trails for touring, a rope tow was installed on a diesel generator—it ran on a donation basis on weekends. In 2020, Ascutney Outdoors debuted a donated T-bar, installed with generous local contributions and volunteer work.
And yet it’s abundantly clear that solvency wasn’t the skeleton key to unlocking solutions to the plethora of issues with the former resort. Rather, financial instability was a symptom of divestment from the community. Mid-century skiing at Ascutney was a symbol of local pride—a service for, and by, the community. Seventy years later, opening day for the T-bar brought families of all ages and abilities—even a half dozen folks who didn’t ski showed up just to be part of the local operation.
“It has come full circle, there’s no question,” Glenn said, grinning by the spinning bullwheel at the new T’s inauguration. “It’s the size it should be, the size it needs to be to still be here 10 years from now. We’ve seen commercial ski areas fail here numerous times,” he said laughing. “So we’ve gotta do something different. And I think that’s why this will be sustainable. Everyone involved recognizes that bigger is not better… and we need to be practical about what we can do and what we can do well, and not try to do the things we can’t.”
That chorus reverberates across the continent among rural ski areas. While the dialogue predominantly provides architecture for other small ski areas to follow, it may also be a message to the ski industry’s biggest names: Help us help ourselves, and we’ll help you.
It’s no secret that small ski areas act as feeder hills for larger resorts. They build skiers who outgrow local hills and move up a tiered system to bigger mountains. Often, in adulthood, they move back, raise kids in a more rural enclave, and usher in a new generation of skiers. The Vails, Alterras and Powdr Corps of the industry understand the cycle. But their methodology can be inherently flawed if their attempts to help reach into operations.
“I think there will be a very big learning curve from the Vails of the world… to get to the reality of a mom-and-pop operation that’s been surviving on bubble gum and Shoe Goo for the last 30 years,” said Christian Theberge, manager of Shames Mountain Ski Area in Terrace, BC—Canada’s first nonprofit community service ski cooperative. “Suddenly they’ll inherit or purchase these places and they’ll go, ‘Wow, there’s a lot of work to do to keep these places going.’ And hopefully in doing that it doesn’t start driving up the cost of the rural ski areas and really change the experience of it.”
At every rural ski area, there’s an inescapable sense that the local connection sends more folks up the hill than a high-speed quad ever could.
Run by My Mountain Co-op, Shames is popular not only among local skiers, but but also non-skiers and businesses that recognize the mountain’s communal importance. The upshot is financial support from corporate partners, while maintaining a distinctly local flavor. There are no accommodations at Shames and, despite expansive terrain potential, no plans to add lift service beyond its slow double chair and upper T-bar (though they are fundraising to install a magic carpet to incentivize young and new skiers).
Infrastructural capital investments are the nonnegotiable headache of any small ski area’s existence, but for many of these hills, that comes in the form of upgrading a diesel generator, or replacing a derelict cat or an aging bullwheel. Safety and sustainability outweigh superfluous development.
“I think there’s too much pressure in the mentality that if you build it, they will come,” Christian said. “And it’s just not true… It doesn’t do you any good to buy yourself a seven-bedroom house thinking you’re gonna end up with five kids. You buy a starter house, and if you end up with a bunch of kids, you upgrade.”
Creaky T-bars, swinging single chairs, jeans, tele skis, slush, sharks and dollar hot dogs have a place in the history of ski culture. Thanks to small community hills like Fergi, Mt. Ascutney and Shames, they also have a place in its future.
Character is a difficult metric for investors to quantify. There’s no algorithm for the way down-home familiarity translates to first-time and repeat visits, no economic indicator associated with relatability. But at every rural ski area there’s an inescapable sense that the local connection sends more folks up the hill than a high-speed quad ever would.
“When [Ascutney] went bankrupt it was like the community had a bum knee or something,” said Bill Howland, son of the former owner. “What’s going on now just validates how it started. To have a business like this, nothing is stronger than having local support—they’ve really got it right now, and they really had it then.”
A handful of townies and volunteers kicked back in Charlie’s shop at Fergi after lunch. Several folks already had beers. A young couple walked in. Flannels, jeans, work boots. “How is it today?” they asked. “It sucks, but here we are,” Charlie said with a laugh. They shrugged, laughed, and got set up with season rentals.
It takes a few minutes to get up the rickety T-bar, barring any mechanical malfunctions or fallen kids, and 20 seconds to get down. From the top, the view north looks across endless arid steppe. Skiing feels out of place out here.
I watched a father kneel in the slush before his disgruntled son, warm snow melting into faded blue jeans. “This is a volunteer community—you’re a member now, and you’re gonna have to work,” he said calmly, but firmly, holding the child’s shoulders. The kid let out a resigned sigh. “Now do you wanna watch the hut while your old man takes a lap?”
The heart of the community ski hill isn’t dictated by topographic constraints, market size, or even snow quality, but rather its commitment to the next generation.
It takes a village.
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