Doc Brigham Finds His Mountain, Nineteen Seventy-Four
Near Snowshoe, West Virginia
The Snowshoe ski resort was the idea of a dentist from Alabama named Thomas Brigham, who had already opened two ski areas in the mountains of North Carolina. Searching for the snowiest ground he could find south of the northeastern ranges, Brigham drove through Pocahontas County and found Cheat Mountain. The data confirmed his instincts.
The mountain's elevation and its position to catch moisture moving in from the west give it an average annual snowfall of about two hundred inches, far heavier than almost anywhere else in the South. Brigham also found something near the summit that sealed the name. Snowshoe hares, the large white rabbits of the boreal north that turn brown in summer and white again in winter, live on this mountain at the absolute southern edge of their range in the eastern United States.
The high elevation creates a cold microclimate that feels nothing like the rest of West Virginia, and the hares have survived here in small numbers. Brigham named the resort after them. Snowshoe Mountain opened for skiing on December thirteenth, nineteen seventy-four.
The early years were difficult. The resort had serious financial trouble in its first decade and faced competition when a nearby resort called Silver Creek opened on the same mountain in nineteen eighty-three. Snowshoe eventually bought Silver Creek in nineteen ninety-two.
In nineteen ninety-five, the Canadian resort company Intrawest acquired Snowshoe and invested heavily in new lifts, snowmaking, and the village at the summit. Today about four hundred eighty thousand people visit in a typical year.
