The Beast and the Birth of Vermont Skiing

Pull back and look at this whole valley, and you are looking at a cradle of American skiing. Vermont helped invent the sport in this country, and these particular mountains sit at the center of that heritage. Just north, Pico opened in nineteen thirty seven and pioneered the first T bar lift in the nation.

Here at Killington, Preston Smith and his Sherburne Corporation turned a roadless wild peak into the largest ski resort in the East, spreading trails across six summits and building a snowmaking empire that stretched the season from October into June. Together, these two neighbors tell the story of how a rural state of dairy farms and stone walls reinvented itself around winter, drawing millions of visitors up mountain roads that once led only to woodlots and hill farms. The nickname says it all.

Beast of the East is not modesty. It is a promise of scale, of steepness, of a mountain so large and so determined to stay open that it became a kind of legend. When you drive away from here, remember that all of it, the lifts, the crowds, the roaring race weekends and the neon of the Access Road, grew from one young man standing on an empty hillside deciding that a beast could be built.