Ober Gatlinburg, Skiing in the South
Near Gatlinburg, Tennessee
It surprises a lot of visitors to learn you can go downhill skiing in Tennessee, but high on Mount Harrison above Gatlinburg, you can. The story starts in nineteen sixty-two, when a modest operation called the Gatlinburg Ski Resort opened with a small lodge, a couple of runs, and an outdoor ice rink. It quickly opened to the public and began to grow.
The real transformation came in the early nineteen seventies, when developer Claude Anders began building an aerial tramway to link downtown Gatlinburg directly to the mountaintop resort. That tramway opened on August fifth, nineteen seventy-three, built by the Swiss firm Von Roll, with two large cabins each carrying up to one hundred twenty passengers, and it remains one of the largest tramways in the country. In nineteen seventy-five the Anders family bought the ski resort and merged it with the tramway operation, and in nineteen seventy-seven they gave it the name it carried for decades, Ober Gatlinburg, from a German phrase meaning upper Gatlinburg or the top of Gatlinburg.
Today it is a year round attraction, skiing and snowboarding in winter, plus an alpine slide, ice rink, and wildlife, all reachable by that same soaring tram ride over the rooftops of the town.
