Now hold on there a minute — because up on the mountain to your right is a ski area that refused to become what everybody told it to become, and then did something almost nobody in America has ever managed. Boone Merrick's the name.
Mad River Glen. It opened in nineteen forty-eight, and the lift they built to get people up the mountain was a SINGLE chair — one seat, one skier, dangling up the mountain alone. That was ordinary enough in nineteen forty-eight.
What's not ordinary is that it's still there. It is the oldest operating single chairlift in the United States. While every other mountain in New England was ripping out the old lifts and putting in high-speed detachable quads that haul six people at a time, Mad River kept the single. One skier. Fifteen quiet minutes up the hill with nobody to talk to but yourself.
And they kept the rest of it too. They never widened and flattened the trails into boulevards — the runs there still follow the shape of the mountain, narrow and twisting through the trees, the way skiing was before bulldozers. They still don't allow snowboarding. Their bumper sticker — and you'll see it on cars all over Vermont — just says SKI IT IF YOU CAN, which is either an invitation or a dare depending on how you're feeling.
Now here's the turn. By the nineteen nineties that stubbornness had a price: a small mountain that refuses to modernize does not make money, and it was for sale, and everybody knew what happens next. Somebody buys it, puts in the fast lifts, widens the trails, builds the condominiums, and it becomes like everywhere else.
So in nineteen ninety-five the skiers bought it themselves. They formed a cooperative — the first ski area in America owned by the people who ski it — sold shares to anybody who cared enough to buy one, and took the mountain off the market. Not investors. Skiers. Thousands of them, holding a share apiece.
They've owned it ever since, and they have voted, over and over, to keep the single chair and keep the trails narrow and keep it hard.
So when you look up at that mountain: that's a place that a few thousand ordinary people bought with their own money, specifically so that it would never get any easier. I find that a genuinely remarkable thing for a country to contain.