The purpose of this blog...

 A year ago I started a project to document as many lost ski areas as possible. It was a way to pass the time during covid19 quarantine. It kept me out of the house, active and away from people. At the same time it brought me back to a fascination with abandoned places and the history of skiing in the Northeast that I'd had since I was a teenager. Many of these locations were already known to me, in the back of my head from evenings spent poring over sites like NELSAP, looking at pictures of lift towers crowded out by trees. I'm not sure why it fascinated me so. Maybe the juxtaposition of the manmade being overcome by nature grabbed my attention. Or maybe it just sent the imagination turning to think about what it must have been like to ski those hills in decades past. Was it like my local hill? Abandoned places necessarily raise questions, and the inquiring mind wants to answer those questions, I suppose.

In any event, I began filming and photographing lost ski areas, slowly working through the lists of closed and defunct ski lifts, lodges and overgrown slopes. Researching lost ski areas has never been particularly easy. The amount of information on many areas is practically non existent. Hard sources, photographs and the like, sometimes don't exist unless they're in somebody's basement, and have never been digitized. Thus, as I've done my digging on these lost areas I've had to make for myself a little trove of old pictures, newspaper clippings and stories that I've gathered online.

And that brings us back to this blog. This is mostly a way for me to organize my thoughts regarding the places I've visited, or mean to visit. A sort of repository and resource hopefully others can make use of, and a kind of chronicle of my own trips and thoughts on places still to explore.