How Vermont Learned to Ski

The bare ribbons cut down the mountainsides are ski trails, and Vermont's whole relationship with winter was invented within living memory.

Before the nineteen thirties, snow was simply something you endured. Then a few things happened at once. Scandinavian and Austrian immigrants brought the sport over. The railroads started running snow trains up from New York and Boston — whole trainloads of people arriving to slide down hills. And in nineteen thirty-four, in Woodstock, somebody rigged a length of rope to a Model T engine and made the first ski tow in America. Before that, every run you skied you first walked up.

Then the Depression put young men to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps, and among the roads and bridges and shelters they built, they cut ski trails — by hand, with axes and saws, for a dollar a day. A great deal of what people ski in Vermont today was carved out of the mountain by twenty-year-olds in nineteen thirty-five.

What that means for you, if you are not here in winter: those trails are hiking routes and mountain-bike descents the rest of the year, and several of the resorts run lifts in summer and autumn. A chairlift ride in early October, with the whole valley turning underneath you, is one of the best-value hours in the state.

And in winter, this road is how you reach nearly all of it. Route One Hundred is the string; the ski areas are the beads.