The Ski Industry and the Invention of Vermont Winter

For most of Vermont's history, winter was an economic problem. The roads closed. The farms went dormant. The population that could afford to leave, left. Vermont's rural economy contracted every November and did not recover until mud season finished in April.

The transformation of winter from liability to asset began in the nineteen thirties, and it happened almost by accident.

The first rope tow in North America to charge a fare was installed on a farm in Woodstock, Vermont, on January twenty-eighth, nineteen thirty-four. A farmer named Clinton Gilbert strung a rope driven by a Model T Ford engine across a hillside on his property, and a group of skiers from the town, some of them connected to the Dartmouth College ski culture in New Hampshire, paid twenty-five cents to ride it up the slope. The technology was nothing, just a loop of manila rope turning on pulleys. But the concept of a mechanized uphill conveyance changed what skiing could be, and word spread fast.

Within a decade, rope tows appeared on hillsides across the Green Mountains. By nineteen thirty-three, the Civilian Conservation Corps had cut the first ski trail on Mount Mansfield, Vermont's highest peak, above Stowe. The Mad River Glen ski area opened in nineteen forty-eight, built around a philosophy of natural terrain and minimal grooming that its owners have maintained with a kind of ideological stubbornness ever since. Killington began operation in nineteen fifty-eight. Sugarbush followed in nineteen fifty-eight as well. Stowe had already been operating in some form since the nineteen thirties and grew into one of the most recognized ski destinations in the eastern United States.

The ski industry did not just bring money into Vermont. It restructured the state's relationship with its own landscape. Mountains that had been farmed to their summits in the eighteenth century, then logged, then abandoned, were reimagined as recreation infrastructure. The old farm families who had watched their neighbors leave for mill towns in Massachusetts discovered that city dwellers from Boston and New York and Hartford were willing to drive for hours to stand in the cold on a hillside. Vermont began building an economy around the idea of itself.