How Stowe Became the Ski Capital of the East

Skiing arrived in Stowe not through any grand design but through a combination of geography, New Deal labor, and one Austrian instructor who happened to find himself in Vermont at exactly the right moment. The mountain was obvious. Mount Mansfield's east-facing slopes had good pitch, reliable snow, and a vertical drop that put it in a class by itself among New England peaks. What the mountain lacked in the nineteen thirties was infrastructure.

The Civilian Conservation Corps, the federal work program created during the Depression, helped provide it. Corps workers began cutting ski trails through the forest on Mount Mansfield as early as nineteen thirty-three, creating the foundation for what would become one of the most celebrated ski mountains on the East Coast. Around the same time, a young Austrian named Sepp Ruschp arrived in Stowe. He had trained as a ski instructor in Austria and applied what he had learned in the Alps to the slopes of Vermont. Ruschp became the first director of the ski school at what is now Stowe Mountain Resort and spent his career building the school into one of the finest in the country.

The Mount Mansfield Ski Patrol, organized in those same years, became the oldest continuously operating ski patrol in the United States. By the nineteen fifties and sixties, Stowe had developed a reputation it has maintained: the Ski Capital of the East. The alpine character that grew up here, shaped partly by European immigrants who brought their mountain skills across the Atlantic, gave Stowe an identity that set it apart from the resort towns that followed in its wake.