Ski Butternut

Skiing on Warner Mountain dates to 1936 and 1937, per the Berkshire Edge's retelling of New England Ski History: the Civilian Conservation Corps cut two trails atop the mountain, whose summit the Berkshire Edge gives as 1,770 feet, leading to the G-Bar-S Dude Ranch, owned by Henry J. "Pop" Cairns, who had purchased the Warner Mountain property in 1929 and opened the ranch in 1936. By the 1939-40 season, two rope tows were running and the area drew 14,500 visitors that season; it stayed open through World War II while other ski areas closed. That property was sold in April 1960 to James and Margaret Joyce of Barrington School, Inc., which ran into financial trouble and let the land sit idle. Ski Butternut's own history page states: "In 1962, a quiet ceremony in Boston celebrated the marriage between a fledgling corporation called Butternut and the Department of Environmental Management of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts," describing the resort as "located on the northern slopes of East Mountain State Forest near the lovely village of Great Barrington" -- the resort's own history page describes this 1962 agreement as being with the Department of Environmental Management, an agency not created until 1975. Channing Murdock, a former Mount Snow employee and former manager of Mohawk Mountain in Cornwall, Connecticut, purchased the property with his wife Jane Murdock in 1962; the couple invested in new ski terrain, a vertical double chairlift, and a new base lodge before reopening the area as Butternut Basin on Christmas Eve 1963. Jeffrey Murdock, son of founders Channing and Jane Murdock, took over management from his father in June 1994 and remained its owner as of a January 2024 Berkshire Edge article. The May 29, 1995 Great Barrington tornado -- rated F-4 by the National Weather Service, the second-strongest rating on the Fujita scale -- tracked east, felling dozens of large trees on East Mountain before damaging Ski Butternut and several homes in the Lake Buel area and killing three people near Eagleton School, per the Berkshire Edge's own account; then-fire chief Mike Fitzpatrick separately recalled his own experience at the firehouse that day in the same article. Ski Butternut's homepage announced the installation of a new Skytrac lift, "Jane's Quad," to replace the Overbrook Triple Chair for the 2025-2026 season, honoring co-founder "Jane Murdock, who passed away recently at age 88" and who "opened the ski area with her husband Channing in 1963." Ski Butternut's history page states that founder Channing Brown Murdock "passed away peacefully" on July 8, 2026, at the age of 91.