Sugar Mountain: Some of the South's Southernmost Skiing

You are near Sugar Mountain Resort, today the largest ski area in North Carolina and among the southernmost slopes in the eastern United States. The resort was born from an ambitious land assembly. A retired general named Alexander Andrews and a partner, Albert Johnson, bought some two thousand acres and combined it with nine hundred acres owned by George McRae, a tract belonging to Julian Morton, and two Norwood Hollow farms.

Construction of the ski area began in early nineteen sixty-nine, and the slopes opened to the public for the first time on December nineteenth of that year. The early years were not easy. In March of nineteen seventy-six an Atlanta developer bought controlling interest, and within weeks the resort closed its doors for the first time.

It reopened under new management, changed hands again, and the company declared bankruptcy in nineteen seventy-seven before the mountain found firmer footing. Sugar Mountain rises to more than five thousand three hundred feet, and its cold, high elevation lets machines pile up snow even in a southern latitude where winters run milder than in New England. Today the resort offers roughly one hundred twenty-five acres of skiable terrain, along with ice skating, tubing, and summer hiking.

It is proof of a stubborn idea: that you can carve a real winter sports economy out of the southern Appalachians.