The Skimobile — George Morton's Invention at Mount Cranmore
Near North Conway, New Hampshire
When Mount Cranmore opened for skiing in the winter of nineteen thirty-seven and thirty-eight, it had a simple rope tow. The following season brought something far more unusual. A local mechanic named George Morton designed a ski lift unlike anything else in the country.
He called it the Skimobile. Instead of a cable strung overhead carrying chairs or gondolas, Morton's invention ran small wooden cabs along a wooden track fixed directly to the face of the mountain, like a narrow-gauge railway climbing uphill. Riders sat inside the little cars, which were pulled up the slope by a cable system, riding the track to about halfway up Cranmore.
The machine was unlike anything in ski resort design before or since, a contraption that looked more like a fairground ride than a piece of mountain infrastructure. It worked. For decades the Skimobile was one of the identifying features that made Cranmore recognizable among New England ski areas.
Skiers came partly for the unusual ride as much as for the runs. The original Skimobile eventually shut down and was abandoned by the late nineteen eighties. It remains a reminder that North Conway's ski industry was built in part on genuine local ingenuity.
