Melted away

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

A Mack family photo from 1969 shows the now-closed Groton Hills Ski Area a far cry from modern ski areas.

In early spring in the late 1950s, the melting slopes of Priest's Ski Area in Groton would be littered with coins, left there by skiers during the winter season.

"When people fell down, they'd lose their change," recalls Cynthia Kollarics, whose parents opened Priest's in 1955. "One of my favorite things to do in the spring was to walk the slopes and pick up the change."

For some three decades, the steep hogback in Groton was a family ski area, where thousands of children made their first shaky ski turns and tangled for the first time with a primitive rope tow.

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

However, the history of Priest's 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 more recent casualties, such as Blanchard Hill in Dunstable, which operated until the mid-1980s. Others closed decades earlier, such as Kenwood Slope in Dracut, Skyfields in Groton, the Westford Tow in Westford, and the Methuen Ski Area. 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, and the author of the 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."

Neighborhoods may have been ski slopes, too. That's what happened to Priest's, later called Groton Hills. "It's homes and backyards now," says Kollarics. What remains of the family business are memories and old photographs.

The story behind Priest's, like that of many lost ski areas, begins with a little old-fashioned American enterprise. Kollarics's father, Richard Priest, operated an orchard on the site in the 1950s, growing apples and peaches. Part of the property was a steep slope, mostly clear of trees, and in 1955 Priest saw skiing as an opportunity to use the land year-round.

The newly founded Priest's Ski Area used an apple as its logo. The snack bar sold homemade doughnuts. And Richard Priest even "put a lot of research into snowmaking," says Kollarics. "He had a contraption that could make snow. The business fell heavily on the weather and whether or not you had snow when the kids were on vacation."

Kollarics, born in 1950, worked in the family business as a child collecting empty soda bottles.

Richard Priest died in 1964. Kollarics's mother ran the ski area for another two seasons before selling. The name changed to Groton Hills, and the ski area operated until the early 1980s, according to Davis's research.

Davis, 30, a skier for most of his life, has studied skiing 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 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 chairlifts," 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 after the Soviets invaded in 1979.

Before he became an online librarian of ski history, Davis 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 neighborhood ski 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, including Priest's/Groton Hills, 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, for 1966-67, 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 the online project, showing the elder Don racing down the slope at Groton Hills.

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 Groton Hills and 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 in her father's 1941 Cadillac. 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."