Snowshoe and Cheat Mountain: The High Alleghenies

You are on Cheat Mountain, one of the great ridges of the Allegheny Mountains in the highlands of eastern West Virginia. The mountain rises to nearly four thousand eight hundred and fifty feet at its highest point, a summit called Thorny Flat, which makes it the second highest peak in the state. At these elevations the trees shift from the mixed hardwood forests of lower West Virginia into a boreal landscape of red spruce and balsam fir that looks and smells more like Canada than the mid-Atlantic states. This is an island of the far north stranded on a southern summit.

The county surrounding you is Pocahontas County, one of the most remote and least densely populated in the eastern United States. Before European settlement, these mountains were hunting territory claimed by the Iroquois Confederacy, who maintained the high country as a game preserve after pushing earlier peoples from the region. A British treaty of seventeen fifty-eight formally reserved the land west of the Allegheny ridge for Native peoples, a boundary that colonial settlers ignored within years of its signing.

Cheat Mountain has lived several distinct lives. For most of recorded history it was a forested wilderness, too cold and steep and far from roads to attract settlers. Its first industrial chapter began around nineteen hundred, when railroad companies pushed lines up from the valley towns of Pocahontas County and the logging began on an enormous scale. By the time the last log came down around nineteen sixty, the mountain had been largely stripped of its ancient red spruce forest.

The second chapter began in nineteen sixty-two, when the state of West Virginia rescued the old logging railroad at the nearby company town of Cass and turned it into a scenic railroad park. The Shay locomotives that once hauled timber down the mountain still haul passengers up it today.

The third chapter began in nineteen seventy-four, when a dentist from North Carolina named Thomas Brigham drove up here looking for the snowiest slopes in the South. He found them. The mountain averages roughly one hundred fifty inches of snow in a good winter. He also found something else near the summit: snowshoe hares, the large white rabbits of the boreal north, living at the southernmost edge of their entire eastern range. He named the resort after them.

The ski runs you see today carry names from the logging era: Skidder, Ballhooter, Powder Monkey, words from the vocabulary of the men who worked these slopes before the lifts went up.