Melted away

Memories of region's long-departed mom & pop ski areas are kept alive with help of enthusiast's online project

A 1950s view from atop Norseman's Hill, at routes 117 and 110 in Bolton; the family operation closed in about '57, after three dry winters in a row. (Gail Estano)

The former Norseman's Hill ski area in Bolton is just a wooded knob today, and it's hard to imagine ski jumpers flying down the hill and 100 feet through the air.

But in the 1950s, the humble hummock at the intersection of routes 110 and 117 was home to a 40-meter ski jump and a small, no-frills family skiing area, where "groomed conditions" meant the wooden ski jump had been doused with a garden hose.

"The spray would harden into ice crystals," recalls Gail Estano, whose father opened Norseman's Hill more than 50 years ago. "That's what they used to almost kill themselves."

Small ski areas, many of them mom-and-pop businesses or municipal operations, were once common throughout Massachusetts. But as they closed, the slice of Americana has largely slipped away, like silver diners and drive-in movie theaters.

However, the history of Norseman's Hill is part of the legacy preserved on the Internet through the New England Lost Ski Areas Project.

Some of the region's nearly 600 entries at www.nelsap.org are recent casualties, such as Jericho Hill in Marlborough, which operated until the mid-1990s. Others had closed down decades earlier, such as Prospect Hill in Waltham, Sweatt Hill in Wrentham, Cat Rock in Weston, and Brown's Peak in Shrewsbury. Many fell victim to warm winters or to competition from big-mountain snowmaking, grooming, and amenities.

The 10-year-old Internet history project is the creation of Chelmsford native Jeremy Davis, a member of the board of directors of the New England Ski Museum in New Hampshire, and the author of a book, "Lost Ski Areas of the White Mountains."

"You never know when you're looking" at a hill that was a ski area, Davis says. "Things grow fast in New England. What looks like a forest now might have been a ski slope 40 years ago."

That's a good description of Norseman's Hill. "It's all grown over," Estano says. There's nothing left of the ski jump but memories and old photographs.

The story behind Norseman's, like that of many lost ski areas, begins with a little old-fashioned American enterprise. Estano's father, Donald W. Erickson, bought 100 acres around the hill in 1948, cleared some trails for skiing, hooked up a primitive rope tow powered by an old Ford engine in 1950, and hoped for snow.

Erickson was the son of Swedish immigrants, from a culture steeped in winter sports. "Skiing was in his blood," Estano says. "He did mostly jumping." Her father ran the ski area until about 1957, hosting a number of ski jump meets.

But Norseman's Hill was at the mercy of the weather, and three consecutive dry winters fatally wounded the business, Estano says.

Davis, 30, a skier for most of his life, has studied the sport's history for more than 10 years. He recalls a trip to New Hampshire in which he found himself fascinated with mountains that had closed, such as Mt. Whittier in West Ossipee, one of the larger areas to go out of business, and the Tyrol Ski Area, in Jackson. He wanted to know more about them, but nothing like a central clearinghouse of information existed.

"I did my research in antique shops, in old ski guide books and by talking to random people on chair lifts," says Davis.

In 1998, as a hobby, he put the history he had collected on the Web. Skiers soon began to e-mail him with more details, and with photos and personal accounts of the lost ski areas on the site. Tips started arriving about lost ski areas that Davis hadn't yet discovered. The messages have never stopped.

"Every day I get 15-20 new e-mails, with people saying, 'Let me tell you about my mountain . . .' My in-box is a fun place to visit because I never know what I'm going to get."

His project has cataloged 591 slopes in New England, as well as 74 others across the country, Canada, and elsewhere. The most obscure may be a bare-bones report of a slope 10 miles south of Kabul, Afghanistan, which reportedly closed when the Soviets invaded in 1979.

Before Davis became an online librarian of ski history, he graduated from Lyndon State College in Lyndonville, Vt. He lives now outside Saratoga, Springs, N.Y., where he works as a meteorologist.

He has skied all over New England, at the big resorts and at many of the remaining small-town areas. He can't help think about the ones that got away. If Davis had a time machine, he'd dial back a few decades and visit Dutch Hill in Heartwellville, Vt. The mid-sized mountain offered about a dozen runs, operating from around 1944 to 1985, according to his research.

The forest is rapidly reclaiming the slopes, and nature soon will obliterate the last traces of the ski area, Davis reports.

"They had just the right mix of trails," says Davis. "I've hiked it and it's quite challenging. It's a pretty steep hill."

Like a lot of smaller ski areas, Dutch Hill couldn't offer heated gondolas to whisk skiers up the slopes. The smaller areas employed T-bars or rope tows, resembling a motorized clothesline between huge pulleys, to drag skiers up the hill.

As a kid in the 1960s, skiing with his dad at small areas around Massachusetts, Don Cosgrove learned to wear old clothes to the slopes. "What I remember is the rope tow burning the clothes off of you," the Leominster resident says. "The right side of your parka got shredded and when you got to the top, your gloves were shiny and hot."

"You got to the end of the tow where the pulley was and you had to release real fast," adds Cosgrove's 80-year-old father, also named Don, from Fitchburg. The elder Cosgrove skied until he was 75. "It was cheap back" in the 1960s, he says. "It was a way to get out of the house and have a good workout." As an example, in the 1966-67 season, an all-day pass at the old Mt. Watatic area in Ashby was $4.50, according to Jeff Leich, executive director of the New England Ski Museum.

The Cosgroves have contributed a photo to Davis' project from the former Groton Hills Ski Area, in Groton.

Callie Mack, 53, also contributed photos to the project. Growing up in Arlington, she learned to ski at mom and pop ski areas around Massachusetts, such as the now-defunct Hidden Valley in Ashburnham. She remembers "a more innocent era.

"People were less concerned about buying the fanciest ski equipment. Skiing was a family activity and something you could do without breaking the bank. Maybe people expected a little less, but maybe we had more fun."

She wore lace-up ski boots back then, and old clothes that left her so cold and numb she once stabbed herself in the leg with a ski pole, but didn't realize it until she saw blood on the ride home. She lives in San Diego now, and misses the New England winters she remembers from her youth. "That was skiing in the 1960s," she says, "a lot of rough and tumble."