Within a few short years, what had started as Jeff and Gerry grew into a band of over a dozen volunteers. They tied ribbons around trees in prospective ski zones during the winter, and returned in the summer and fall to cut trees, move deadfall and clear brush—anything that would opti-mize the ski routes come snowfall. They called themselves the Angry Beavers after the Nickelodeon cartoon, and, with Jeff at the helm, added handfuls of trails in those first years. After lobbying to Black’s volunteer board to create open boundaries in 2014, that number exploded. “It just spiraled,” says Carter. “Suddenly we had a moun-tain made by volunteer labor. Today, we have well over 40 glades—it’s become a major part of our ski area.” Yet with great expansion comes great responsibility. Before every season, Jeff meets with the board to explain his trail maintenance plan and then runs everything by ski patrol. In fact, it could reasonably be argued that there isn’t a slash on the mountain that hasn’t been run by the Beavers’ boss. “Jeff is the mayor,” explains Lee McKay, a retired science teacher from Cape Elizabeth, ME, and one of Jeff’s go-to trailblazers. “Skiers are just coming up to him throughout the day telling him their cuts and where they might need bridges or work in the future.” That kind of communication and flow is the name of the game at Black. Using the skills he learned thinning forests on the farm, Jeff has helped the Beavers establish a system for glading that lets the terrain shine. Volunteers ranging in age from early 20s to late 70s cut trees of any size, but make sure to leave gaps of six to 12 feet in between standing trunks for fluid and fast skiing. Entering East Bowl off Black’s main triple, the playground is easy to find. The Beavers grind stumps down to the ground and move deadfall to create ramps and rollers over rocks, so with just over a foot of snow, these zones are game on. “We have some pretty technical stuff for a small, interme-diate mountain,” Jeff says. “We have drops, 20-foot cliffs and hucks. When this place shines, it’s really something to see.” Riding up the Summit Triple on a powder day, the evidence of the Beavers’ handiwork is often heard before it’s seen. Whoops and hollers reverberate across the hill as pa-trons of all ages dip into groves of hardwood, a phenomenon Jeff amusedly calls the “woo birds.” 048 The Ski Journal
The Ski Journal Volume 17, Issue 4: Page 48
