Saskadena Six

The ski area now called Saskadena Six was established in July 1936 when Wallace "Bunny" Bertram acquired about 30 acres on Perry Hill (locally "Hill 6") and named the resulting ski hill Suicide Six, according to New England Ski History's "Suicide Six" area history page. Bertram sold the area to Laurance Rockefeller in 1961; Rockefeller's RockResorts subsequently marketed it together with Mt. Tom, a separate, now-closed Woodstock-area ski area, until Mt. Tom closed in the late 1970s. The area was renamed from Suicide Six to Saskadena Six in the summer of 2022 by its owner, the Woodstock Inn & Resort, citing "increasing awareness surrounding mental health" and concerns about the insensitivity of the old name, per Saskadena Six's own "Our New Name" page. "Saskadena" means "standing mountain" in Abenaki and was chosen in consultation with Chief Don Stevens of the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk-Abenaki Nation; "Six" preserves the reference to Bertram's original Hill 6. In 1982 the area hosted the National Snow Snurfing Championship, an early snowboarding competition in which roughly 150 "snurfers" competed in downhill and giant slalom events, a milestone the resort credits as helping establish modern snowboarding, per Saskadena Six's own Mountain Info page. A 1,650-foot double chairlift was installed at the area in 1978; a next-generation Leitner-Poma quad chairlift was added in a later era. The resort launched a lift-served mountain bike program in 2018, with more than 6 miles of dedicated bike trails alongside the ski trails.