Melted away

Memories of region's 'lost' ski areas are kept alive on the Internet

In the 1940s, Nick Nichols lifts daughter Sandy at the family-owned Locust Lawn area in Danvers. (Sandy Nichols Ward)

In the 1950s, old cars owned by the Nichols family of Danvers tended to be reassigned to ski lift duty, powering the jury-rigged tow ropes at Locust Lawn, a ski club run on family land.

If nobody was paying attention, the junkers pulling the tows would run out of fuel and the ski operation would sputter to a dead stop until somebody lugged out the gas can.

Running out of snow was worse. "We'd make best use of the snow we had," recalls Sandy Nichols Ward, who grew up next to the Danvers ski area founded by her father. "We'd shovel it from the shady spots to the bare spots."

Small ski areas, many of them mom and pop businesses, clubs or municipal slopes, 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.

The history of Locust Lawn and nearly 600 other "lost" ski areas in New England has been preserved by the New England Lost Ski Areas Project, online at www.nelsap.org.

Some of the entries are recent casualties, such as Hamilton Ski Tow, which operated in Hamilton into the 1980s. Others were lost long ago, such as Thunderhead in Haverhill, Page's Hill in Peabody, Delaney Ski Slope in Melrose, and Break Hill in West Newbury. Many fell victim to warm win ters 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."

Few of the region's former ski areas are as far lost as Locust Lawn; even the hilltop is gone, carved away in the early 1970s during the construction of Interstate 95, says Ward. "It was heart-wrenching for my family to watch the earth-moving machines."

The history of Locust Lawn, like that of many lost ski areas, begins with a little old-fashioned American enterprise.

Ward's father, Nick Nichols, cleared trails on the family-owned land in Danvers and set up rope tows on the 35-acre property, probably in the 1940s.

The ski area became a private recreation club. Membership was capped at 100 adults and their families, who paid up to $10 a year in dues.

"For families with three or four kids, this was the only way they could afford to ski," Ward says. Club bylaws prohibited alcohol, and required members to help with maintenance chores. The Locust Lawn Club maintained a waiting list of families who wanted to join.

Never meant to be a money-maker, the ski area may have started as a way to pay the taxes on the land and keep the property undeveloped, says Ward, a retired reference librarian living now in Holyoke.

Squeezed out by the highway construction, the Locust Lawn Club moved its rope tows to Topsfield in the 1970s, but eventually stopped operating when liability insurance became too expensive, she says.

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 ski areas 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 the Lost Ski Areas Project 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, he put the history he had collected as a hobby 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 arrived about lost ski areas that Davis hadn't yet discovered. The messages have never stopped.

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

His project has cataloged 591 lost ski areas in New England, and 73 in other states, Canada and elsewhere. The most obscure may be the bare-bones report of a ski area 10 miles south of Kabul, Afghanistan, that reportedly closed when 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. That 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 says.

"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 father 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," he 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. The elder Cosgrove skied until he was 75 years old. "It was cheap" back in the 1960s, he said. "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' history project, taken at the former Groton Hills Ski Area in Groton.

Callie Mack, now 53, has 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 those days as "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.

Mack 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."