Wisp: Maryland's Only Ski Resort Started on a Cow Pasture
Near Wisp, Maryland
Look up at Marsh Mountain and you are looking at the only downhill ski resort in the entire state of Maryland. It began as a gamble by a local motel owner named Helmuth Heise, who everyone called Ace. In the winter of nineteen fifty five and fifty six, Heise leased a cow pasture on this mountainside and decided the tourists who came to Deep Creek Lake in summer might come back in winter if he gave them something to do.
He drove all the way to New Hampshire to buy a used rope tow, hauled it home, and set it up beside a small hut, using a truck to hand out rental gear. It was crude, and it worked. Heise and his wife Evelyn, along with a handful of Garrett County partners, were betting on a four season economy in a county that had always emptied out when the leaves fell.
That gamble grew into a resort with dozens of trails and a vertical drop of about seven hundred feet, served by about a dozen lifts. Wisp celebrated its seventieth season in the winter of twenty twenty five. Not bad for a rope tow bolted onto a cow field.
