Article | Blast From the Past

This is an article that appeared in the 2016 issue of 4241′ Magazine. Click on the image to read it online at Issuu, or read the text below.

Blast From the Past

Killington’s rich skiing history spans nearly six decades
by Dave Young

In today’s world of high-speed gondolas, winch-assisted grooming machines and skis that practically turn themselves, it’s easy to forget that skiing was a riskier endeavor practiced by only the most adventurous souls in the not-too-distant past.

In the nearly 60 years that make up the history of iconic Killington Resort, the sport has undergone a dramatic transformation from a rudimentary, mid-’50s pastime to today’s thriving tourist industry. Over that time, Killington Resort has mirrored the sport’s trajectory, expanding from the unexceptional beginnings of two surface lifts serving Snowdon Mountain to the largest four-season resort in Eastern North America.

Reminders of Killington’s history lie close to the surface. Whether your at Killington for the weekend, the season, or like so many of us, a lifetime, you’ll see signs of the resort’s rich history all around. As you dine, drink and dance in the many establishments along Killington Road, you’re sure to come across old trail maps, posters and photos that offer a glimpse of a Killington ski area quite different from the one that exists today.

A postcard piqued my own interest in Killington history way back in 1990. Working that season in the Killington Gondola Rental Shop, which, sadly, is now a denizen of the history books, I sold souvenirs and Killington postcards. One postcard depicted happy skiers beneath snow-covered trees on a trail identified in the caption as East Glade.

By 1990, East Glade was a treeless trail, but that postcard made me wonder what it had been like in 1958, when it was still dotted with birches. Today, even the name East Glade is gone, but you can still ski the trail, now called Reason, and imagine yourself dipping between those birches.

Artifacts that speak to the way things used to be are everywhere. A ride on the Snowdon Poma, one of Killington’s original two lifts, which has operated every season since it opened in 1958, is a reminder of what Killington was like before chairlifts. An excursion to the Motor Room Bar, located inside the top terminal of Killington’s first quad chairlift, will take you back to the early years of Bear Mountain. Perhaps these sites will pique your own curiosity, just like that postcard did for mine so many years ago.

The Beginning
Today, Killington Resort is a sprawling complex of five base areas, 21 lifts and 155 trails spread across six mountain areas. Aptly nicknamed The Beast of the East, Killington Resort is big, but this was not always the case. In the early 1950s, the area now known as Killington was Green Mountain wilderness. It would take years of hard work and dogged determination for Preston Leete Smith, aided by his wife Sue and his business associates Joseph Van Vleck and Joe and Mary Sargent, to realize his dream of building a ski resort on Killington Peak.

The very first Killington Basin Ski Area skiers purchased their lift tickets from a repurposed chicken coop on the frosty Saturday morning of December 13, 1958. The Killington Base Lodge wouldn’t be complete until the fall of 1959, so a cast-off Civilian Conservation Corps shack served as the first warming hut while an eight-seat outhouse handled sanitary duties. Two Poma surface lifts—Poma 1 and Poma 2—ran that day, allowing the first Killington skiers to gain the summit of Snowdon Mountain and its two routes back down, Bunny Buster and Mouse Run. By January of 1959, Pres Smith and his crew had added two more Pomas, one on the North Ridge, call the Glades Poma, and the Novice Poma near the present-day Killington Ski Club

Killington finally got a chairlift, the Killington Double, during the winter of 1959-60. The lift was delivered late, around Thanksgiving 1959, and with the budding business strapped for cash, Smith and his small crew installed it themselves, assembling the towers in the parking lot and moving them into place on the steep terrain with a bulldozer and an army-surplus trailer.

As with the earlier Poma installations, they used a gin-pole, a sort of site-built crane, to place the towers onto concrete foundations they had dug and mixed by hand. They did all this while perched on the side of Killington Peak in subzero temperatures and under as much as 13 feet of snow, finally wrapping construction in March 1960. The Killington Double followed the same route traveled by the K-1 Express Gondola today, so tip your hat to those resolute Killington pioneers the next time you travel overhead in the comfort of an enclosed gondola cabin.

Building a ski area from the ground up with limited resources and equipment was a difficult undertaking, but skiing in the 1950s was no coddled affair, either. The most well heeled skiers in 1958 might have splurged on a pair of fashionable Head Standard skis, Cubco “safety” bindings and Lange plastic boots, but many skiers of the day were still on wooden skis, leather boots and leg-breaking “bear trap” bindings. As for skiwear, wool was the pinnacle of technology.

The Sixties
The ’60s were a booming time for the sport of skiing and the increasingly successful Killington Basin Ski Area. When Snowshed opened in 1961, it was the first base area in the country to cater to novice skiers. The investment proved a sound one, as Snowshed formed the foundation that would allow Killington to build one of the country’s leading ski schools.

Other highlights of the decade included the development of the Ramshead base area, installation of the first snowmaking system and the purchase of Tucker Sno-Cats, the first specialized grooming machines at Killington.

Local business owner Judy Storch was one of Killington Basin Ski Area’s early employees and has resided in Killington for more than 50 years. She spoke to why she decided to move to Killington. “I was blowing my ski budget driving to Vermont every weekend,” she says. “So I thought, why not stay there? It was Presidents’ Day weekend, 1964. I was hired as a secretary for $1.50 an hour and I moved into the Staff Lodge, in the building that eventually became studios for Killington TV. Back then there were separate men’s and women’s bunk rooms in the basement and the Killington Lodging Bureau was upstairs.”

In 1964, Killington’s administrative offices were located below the Killington Base Lodge Cafeteria.
“It was terribly loud,” Storch recalls. “Imagine trying to talk on the phone with ski boots clomping over your head all day.” According to Storch, the best part about her new job was skiing every day during her lunch hour. “It took 65 minutes to make three runs riding the two Snowdon Pomas,” she days, “so I was only five minutes late getting back to work.”

Storch reminisces about her equipment from those days. “I wore Feller Hosen stretch pants from Austria,” she says. “They were the only pants to have and they lasted forever. We all wore Obermeyer parkas and we used to buy turtlenecks by the dozen, either black or white—of course, black ones were easier to keep clean.” And for skis and boots, Storch had a pair of Hart Super Pro skis with Marker bindings and Humanic boots.

“In those days, you could send the skis back for refinishing,” she says. “I think I paid $140 for the whole package, which was a lot of money at the time. I got my money’s worth, though—I skied on them for five or six seasons, sent them back to Hart for refinishing, and sold them for $90.”

Killington is known today for a thriving après ski scene, but Storch recalls that the après options were much less diverse in the early years: “There was only one place to go for happy hour—the Red Rob Inn.”
Although the Red Rob is no longer a happy-hour hotspot, the building now houses the Killington Mountain School. After happy hour, Storch said the place to be in the ’60s was the Wobbly Barn Nightclub. The same could be said today.

By late 1964, Judy Storch had moved her office into the new Killington administration building. It was much quieter than her old office, but her desk was a folding card table that could barely support the weight of an IBM typewriter. Today, the majority of Killington’s administrative offices exist in that same building, though many of the desks are sturdier.

As the ’60s drew to a close, Killington’s footprint grew through the development of Killington East, the area traversed today by East Mountain Road. Part of that expansion included construction of the 3.5-mile Killington Gondola, which, at the time of its completion in 1970, was the longest and highest-capacity gondola in the world. The Gondola opened Killington East to residential development. Storch, sensing an opportunity, obtained her realtor license and began working in Killington’s real estate office.

Today, Judy Storch is still in the real estate business and her Killington Valley Real Estate offices now occupy the old farmhouse next to the Wobbly Barn where Pres Smith and his family lived when they were first establishing the Killington Basin Ski Area.

The Seventies
Inflation, bad snow years, fuel shortages and increased environmental regulation slowed progress in the ’70s, but Killington Basin Ski Area found ways to innovate and improve. Killington’s first triple chairlift, the Glades Triple, arrived in 1972, and the chair is still a favorite with early season skiers today, operating as the North Ridge Triple.
In 1977, Killington opened the South Ridge Triple, a unique lift with a triangular footprint remembered by many as the “lift with a left turn.” The turn originally accommodated a mid-station, allowing for high-elevation novice skiing on upper South Ridge. The lift closed in 2011, but some of its towers still stand today.

Killington’s snowmaking improvements in the 1960s had lengthened the season significantly and, under Pres Smith’s lead, the strategy began to improve day-to-day conditions, as well, mitigating the impact of increased skier traffic. In order to ensure that snowmaking research and development would keep pace with his vision, Smith established an R&D Engineering Department that would eventually develop several snow-gun designs, including K-3000 guns that are still in use today.

“I came to Killington hoping to improve my skiing and get out of New York for a while,” says Greg Hiltz, who started working as a Killington snowmaker in 1977. “But I ended up falling in love with this mountain and I’m still here.”
Today, Greg is the snowmaking supervisor, having worked in the department for 39 years. Of the many changes he’s seen in that time, few are more drastic than the change in public perception of snowmaking. “People hated us,” Greg says of his early days making snow. “They’d yell at us: ‘Get out of here! You’re ruining the snow!’”
That reaction contrasts sharply to the hero’s welcome that snowmakers receive today.

The Eighties
Killington celebrated its third decade of operations with the opening of Bear Mountain in 1979. The debut of Bear Mountain’s Outer Limits, the longest, steepest mogul run in the East, made Killington a top destination for freestyle skiers and helped launch the career of World Cup and Olympic champion Donna Weinbrecht.
Weinbrecht is most famous for winning the first Olympic gold medal ever awarded in mogul skiing, in the 1992 Albertville games. In Killington, she’s just as famous for having her name on the coveted Bear Mountain Mogul Challenge trophy five times.

Donna learned to ski in New Jersey but her family built a vacation home in Killington in 1980.
“We were weekend warriors,” says Weinbrecht, who learned to ski in New Jersey. “My dad would drive us up every weekend. He worked a very physical job in construction, and he looked forward to sitting in the car for four-and-a-half hours, skiing on Saturday and Sunday and then turning around and getting us back to school on Monday morning.” Then, her family built a vacation home in Killington in 1980.

“I competed in the second annual Bear Mountain Mogul Challenge,” Weinbrecht says. “I was in high school then, maybe 15 years old. It was my first contest and I didn’t win that year; I fell during my second heat in the finals, but I came back and won the next year, which would have been 1983.”

She would go on to place second in ’84, and win the each of the following three years. After high school, Weinbrecht pursued her goal of making the U.S. Ski Team, and while there was no organized freestyle program in Killington at the time, she trained by skiing lap after lap on Outer Limits. All those runs eventually paid off.

“I made the (U.S. Ski) Team in ’87, at Squaw Valley,” she says. “The course was nice and steep, just like Outer Limits. I never competed on any course that I wasn’t prepared for—there were definitely some challenging World Cup courses—but skiing Outer Limits in every kind of condition, day after day, prepared me for them.”

Donna Weinbrecht still skis every winter in Killington, where she leads mogul camps on the legendary Outer Limits. If she’s not teaching, she might be ripping the bump line on skier’s left of Skyehawk, one of her favorite stashes.

Around the time Weinbrecht began her storied career as a professional skier, Chris Slade, host of the popular, local television show Explore Killington, was visiting from his hometown of Camillus, New York. A chance encounter at Charity’s Tavern in the fall of 1981 landed him a winter job in the Snowshed Rental Shop. That one season has now stretched into 35, and Slade, the longtime host of the popular, local television show Explore Killington, has notched 100 or more days on snow most of those seasons.

Slade describes a typical day of skiing in the early ’80s. “I had a locker at Snowshed Rental,” he says, “so I’d usually start there and warm up with a few runs on Ramshead or Snowdon before heading over to the Northeast Passage Triple. There was a lot of excitement about Northeast Passage then, because it was brand new and there were some great expert trails below the mid-station.”

When it opened in 1982, the Northeast Passage Triple was the country’s longest triple, clocking a 17-minute ride. Today, the chair’s lower half is gone, returning those old expert trails that Slade favored to the forest, but the upper half still operates as the Sunrise Village Triple.

“I don’t remember skiing groomed terrain very often back then,” he says. “We were more into skiing natural terrain; bumps or in the trees. The glades that are named on the map now, like Julio and Lowrider, were not on the map then, so they didn’t see the traffic they do today. I can remember finding fresh powder days after a storm.”

Killington’s first four-person chairlift, The Devil’s Fiddle Quad, opened in 1983, and by 1988, the resort would have five quad chairs, including two detachables, Snowshed Express and Superstar Express.

Snowmaking technology was still advancing at a rapid rate, and Greg Hiltz recalls that there were 115 snowmakers employed in the winter, 30 of whom worked all summer long, installing pipe, welding and building Killington-designed snow guns like the 1988 model K-3000.

The Nineties
The decade kicked off with a watershed moment when, for the 1990-91 season, Killington opened the Northeast Passage Triple to snowboarders for the first time. By the following season, snowboarders were welcome anywhere on the mountain.

1992 marked the opening of the Canyon Quad and, in 1994, the Skyeship Express Gondola, the last lift installed under Pres Smith’s direction, replaced the aging Killington Gondola.

After nearly 40 years of dedication to Killington’s day-to-day operations, Pres Smith finally stepped away in 1996 when American Skiing Company (ASC) took over operation after a merger/buyout with Smith’s company, S-K-I Ltd. The first years of ASC’s ownership brought a flurry of investment in lifts and other amenities. Three new quad chairs, the Needle’s Eye Express, Ramshead Express and Northbrook Quad, were installed in 1996, and the investment continued in 1998 when the K-1 Express Gondola replaced the long, cold Killington Double.

Ski technology influenced resort policy during the ’90s. First, the near-universal adoption of shaped skis elevated the importance of grooming, and then again late in the decade when the introduction of twin-tip skis spurred acceptance of skiers in snowboard parks and halfpipes. The terrain park was born.

The New Millennium
Killington Resort’s current owners, Powdr Corp, took over the reins in 2007. The new team quickly went to work, replacing the aging Skye Peak Quad with the faster, detachable Skye Peak Express Quad, and building the Stash terrain park in 2008.

In January 2014, Killington celebrated the grand opening of its new Peak Lodge. The sustainably designed and operated lodge, located near the summit of Killington Peak, replaced a structure built in 1967, which had also served as the summit terminal of the old 3.5-mile-long Killington Gondola.

Observing the resort from inside the glass-walled Peak Lodge provides a sweeping view of the changes Killington has seen in the last 58 years. Toward the left is the summit of Snowdon, where Killington Basin Ski Area began and where Judy Storch once hurried through her three-run lunch hour. Straight ahead, is the overgrown route that the Killington Gondola once followed, and just its right, Pipe Dream, the trail once home to the uphill line of South Ridge Triple. Bear Mountain pops into view a little farther right, where the upper terminal of the old Devil’s Fiddle chair, Killington’s first quad chairlift now houses the Motor Room Bar.

So much has changed at Killington—and in the sport of skiing—since the resort’s first skiers purchased their lift tickets from Pres Smith’s chicken coop. Most of the changes are welcome ones—skiing is more comfortable, safer and more accessible than ever before. One thing hasn’t changed, though: for all the advances in style and technology, the act of skiing is still driven by the same passion that existed before Killington was a blip on the radar. That passion will keep skiers coming to Killington for years to come.