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Hill-Stead Museum Connecticut Foliage Forecast 169 towns, seven state driving routes

Hill-Stead Museum — Daderot, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Skiing and Snowboarding in the United States

Skiing and Snowboarding in the United States starts with New England, the only region of the seven this project has published so far. The fourteen mountains below are all drawn from that one region: Vermont's cooperative alongside its state-owned neighbor in New Hampshire, Maine's Boyne Resorts mountains, a Rhode Island hill that is the state's whole alpine ski scene, and the small town- and family-run areas beside them. They are not a national selection, because there is not yet a national corpus to select from. Six more regions are planned — the Rockies, the Midwest, the Pacific, the Mid-Atlantic, the Southeast, and Alaska — and each will extend this page with its own mountains once its guides exist.

  1. Mad River Glen, Vermont: the single chair and the co-op that owns it

    Fayston, VT

    Vermont's cooperatively owned mountain, run by its own skiers and shareholders and home to one of only two single chairlifts still operating in the country.

  2. Killington Ski Resort, Vermont: from Sherburne Corporation to passholder ownership

    Killington, VT

    A gondola-served Vermont resort opened in 1958, now owned by a group of local passholders after decades under Sherburne, American Skiing Company, and Powdr.

  3. Stowe Mountain Resort, Vermont: Mount Mansfield, from rope tow to Vail Resorts

    Stowe, VT

    Skiing on Mount Mansfield since 1937, home to the birth of the National Ski Patrol, and today part of the Vail Resorts network.

  4. Jay Peak Resort, Vermont: the tram, the EB-5 fraud, and the mountain that survived it

    Jay, VT

    A tram-served resort in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, incorporated in 1955 and rebuilt out of receivership after a securities-fraud scandal to sell to Pacific Group Resorts in 2022.

  5. Cannon Mountain, New Hampshire: state-owned skiing since 1929, tramway since 1938

    Franconia, NH

    New Hampshire's state-owned mountain in Franconia Notch, with skiing dating to 1929 and a tramway, opened in 1938, that the state itself describes as North America's original passenger aerial tramway.

  6. Waterville Valley Resort, New Hampshire: an Olympic skier's mountain since 1966

    Waterville Valley, NH

    An Olympic skier's mountain: Tom Corcoran began scouting the site in 1964, formed the Waterville Company in 1965, and had the resort open for business by 1966.

  7. Sugarloaf: from a 1950 ski club to Boyne Resorts, by way of a 1986 bankruptcy

    Carrabassett Valley, ME

    Maine's Carrabassett Valley mountain, begun by a ski club in 1950 and run for nearly four decades by the Sugarloaf Mountain Corporation before a 1994 sale, now part of Boyne Resorts.

  8. Sunday River: from a 1958 development corporation to Boyne Resorts

    Newry, ME

    A Newry mountain founded in 1958 by a regional development corporation and personally run by Les Otten from 1980, before three later corporate sales brought it under Boyne Resorts.

  9. Camden Snow Bowl: a Depression-era ski hill with ocean views

    Town of Camden, ME

    A town-owned hill on Ragged Mountain with views of Penobscot Bay, built by Depression-era volunteers and still run by the town of Camden.

  10. Wachusett Mountain: an 1899 state reservation, skied since the 1930s

    Princeton, MA

    A Princeton mountain within Wachusett Mountain State Reservation, on Commonwealth of Massachusetts land since an 1899 reservation, run under a lease since 1968 by the Crowley family's Wachusett Mountain Associates.

  11. Cochran's Ski Area, Vermont: a Richmond backyard rope tow that raised Olympians

    Richmond, VT

    A rope-tow and T-bar hill the Cochran family built in their own Richmond backyard, still run today by Olympic gold medalist Barbara Ann Cochran.

  12. Mohawk Mountain: A 1947 Lease, a Snowmaking Dispute, and the Path to Mount Snow, Butternut, and Sundown

    Town of Cornwall, CT

    Connecticut's Walt Schoenknecht mountain, opened under a 1947 state lease and a proving ground for early snowmaking before he went on to found Mount Snow.

  13. Yawgoo Valley: Richard Downs' 1964 Trails, Rhode Island's First Chairlift, and the de Wardener Family

    Exeter, RI

    Rhode Island's only operating alpine ski area, cut into Yorker Hill starting in 1964 and run by the de Wardener family since a 1980 purchase.

  14. Abenaki Ski Area, New Hampshire: Wolfeboro's town-owned hill since 1940

    Wolfeboro, NH

    The selection's town-run hill: Wolfeboro's Abenaki, run by the town's own parks department, with lift-served skiing since 1940 after earlier hike-up skiing at the site.