STOWE REVISITED
by George Caner

Years have passed since the NE Masters last visited Stowe and some attending this weekend’s races on Spruce Peak may arrive unacquainted with the area or its rich history.  The writer addresses any such gap from a background as a Stowe owner, a skier at Stowe every year (except war years ‘43-’45) since 1941, an innkeeper for the original TopNotch in 1948, and an unskilled downhill racer of the Nose Dive in the early 1950s, when it was a qualified New England downhill trail.

Stowe’s prelift skiing history begins with the first recorded descent of the Toll Road, running from the Toll House area to the near summit, by Dartmouth librarian Nathaniel Goodrich in 1914, and construction by the CCC in the middle 1930s of downhill trails Nose Dive, Bruce and Lord, and later of the S-53, under the inspired guidance of Stowe’s Charlie Lord and Vermont Forester, Perry Merrill.  It is claimed that complaints of a group of women skiers, assembled by Roland Palmedo of the Amateur Ski Club of New York and training at Stowe in 1938 for the scheduled 1940 Winter Olympics, about the arduous climb up the steep slopes of Mt. Mansfield, led Palmedo to conceive and raise funding for the original Stowe chair lift.  Stowe’s storied single chair began operation in December 1940 and functioned thereafter until 1986.  This chair propelled about 250 skiers an hour to the top of the mountain, protected (insufficiently) by cape-like “skins” during a freezing 15 minute ascent.  Once on top, skiers could chose from the then fearsome Nose Dive, the even more fearsome S-53 (in terrain later appropriated by the National), the Lord, a true trail, where you turned, by necessity, at the same point where the skier before you had turned, and the forgiving Toll Road.  Some skiers in the early forties who had not yet broken the yoke of Norwegian tradition disapproved the new uphill facilities and for them the world on Tuesdays was as it should be.  The chairlift did not run on Tuesdays during the war years because this was the day off for the scant WWII lift personnel, and aficionados therefore had to climb the Nose Dive or the Lord on that day for their Mt. Mansfield skiing.  Also during the war, the lift did not run between 12 noon and 1 p.m. because this was when the lift attendants had their lunch. 

Stowe is unique in that its skiing facilities are owned by one of America’s largest corporations, the insurance firm American International Group, through a subsidiary now called Stowe Mansfield Resort.  It is said that C.V. Starr, AIG’s founder, was moved after WWII to do something to avoid the horrendous lines for the single chair, often involving an hour’s wait, stepping up in a 200 yard snake from the State Lodge to the lift, and bought the Mt. Mansfield Company, the owner of the lift, and later other Mansfield skiing facilities, through AIG.  Following Starr’s death, AIG continued to own the mountain company, and does so today, giving the company much needed background strength to carry it through vicissitudes of weather and competition from other areas and activities.

A skier catapulted from pre-World War II ski slopes  to the Stowe of today would think he had never been there before.  The 2002 Sise Cup races are on Spruce Peak, development of which began in 1949 with two rope tows halfway up the hill, and which now features on its left side (looking up) a slalom course with permanent timing facilities used at the UVM Winter Carnival and many other Stowe races.  The advent of giant slalom at Spruce Peak, utilizing its upper half, is a new development.  Unhappily, the transportation lift between Mt. Mansfield and Spruce projected in Stowe Resort’s master plan has not yet been built, so that most Masters will be compelled by race necessities to remain in Stowe’s secondary Spruce Mountain  area. 

Masters who can steal a run or two on the main mountain during the races or can arrive at Stowe a day or so early will find waiting for them a scenario which to many of us justifies the boast of “Ski Capital of the East.”  Looking up the Mountain from the main parking lot, the gondola trails are to the far right – Chin Clip, Gondolier (under the now eight person gondola), Perry Merrill, and Cliff Trail (leading from the gondola area to the Nose Dive).  The next trail, the Nose Dive, is no longer the genuinely expert run it once was, but it has outstanding glades off the Nose Dive “Corridor” to the left (looking down) and skiers taking off from the Nose Dive “By-pass,” and other spots on the trail, can find some great tree skiing.  From right to left, looking up, one then has the choice of the Goat (once “Chamois),” a trail suitable neither for Master’s skis nor for skiers who limit their action to precise carving of turns on pristine and unmogulled terrain, the Lift Line, for showing off, the Starr (formerly International), with a beginning matching the challenge of the upper Goat, the Lookout (under the sole remaining double chair), a joy of natural snow, moguls, and old time skiing, the Hayride, only a small fall-off from the Front Four, remains of the Lord, widened and softened, the intermediate Skimeister, and the triple chair (formerly T-bar) trails, including the North Slope, a class A giant slalom venue.

Snow making began in Stowe in 1966 and grooming with two tractor-like “Thiokols” followed in 1974.  Without snow-making, Stowe would have been shut down during the winters of 1976 and 1980, times of minimal natural snow.  Stowe experimented with snow making for many years and for a brief spell was renown for the massive snow/ice moguls it produced.  One caused an avalanche on the Lift Line, fortunately in the late afternoon after the lifts had shut down, when no one was on the hill.  Your historian in the 1970s witnessed a consummate skier, unfamiliar with local conditions, begin an aggressive descent from the top of the National, pick an apparently snowy cone at the top as a first turning spot, find it to have the texture of glass, lose his skis from under him, and hurtle down 100 yards of National, crashing from mogul to mogul.  Artificial snow making and grooming at Stowe, and its supply of natural snow from a west-east weather flow over Lake Champlain, is the now equal of any New England area. 

A waiting line tip: if the quad single line is long, ride the Lookout double chair.

On Spruce at the weekend races, Go Fast; on Mansfield, if you can get there, do some real skiing and Have Fun.