Pocono Manor Ski Area, Mt. Pocono, PA

In 1976 the US Interstate Highway system completed construction of a 28.5 mile connector between Interstates 81 and 84 in northeast Pennsylvania. The route crossed the sparsely populated glaciated Pocono Plateau allowing drivers to quickly travel between Scranton and Stroudsburg. For years most motorists zipped by, the undulating forest on each side of the dual highway offering a seemingly monotonous wall of trees and rocks interspersed with the occasional swamp or pond for color. The Poconos' history is often that of a place to travel across, not to settle down on. Poor land and bad weather kept European colonists mostly at bay. The era of the grand Victorian hotels brought another kind of transience. People came to sample the air and waters, stayed for a month, and then left. Post-war vacationers drove from New York for a weekend before returning to the white-picket fences of mid-century America. A few years ago the next iteration of that pattern cut itself into the forest along I-380. The Kalahari Resort and indoor waterpark is one of several such operations opening across the mountain interior of the Northeast. Borrowing the form factor of the giant logistics warehouses which sprout like mushrooms around highway cloverleafs through this corridor, this next step in the American pursuit of leisure allows the vacationers to drive hours from the suburbs to the mountains, and then spend all their time inside. It's something to marvel at the combination of factors that bring families miles to a desert-themed waterpark, indoors, in a part of the country renowned for bad weather. 

Just down the road from the new Kalahari combination indoor waterpark, amusement palace and family hibachi restaurant is an interesting point of reference for those bizarrely curious types who like to compare everything modern with everything that used to be modern a century ago. On a map it's called "Pocono Manor". It's a hotel. Or it was a hotel. But it's also a community of one-time vacation homes turned primary residences on top of a spur of the plateau which juts out into the surrounding valley. Ringing the top of the hill are the Arts and Crafts style vacation homes of the well heeled Quaker upper middle class of the Philadelphia gilded era. Build in stages from the late 19th to the early 20th century, the center piece of the whole project was the colonial-revival styled Pocono Manor Hotel. With gardens and a lake house it would have offered a unique counter point to the style of architecture represented by the Kalahari. I say "offered" because the hotel itself no longer exists. If you visited today you would find a single high-rise structure (the last part of the hotel built, added in the late 1940s). Boarded up and blackened, this is the only remaining part of the old grand hotel which survived a fire in 2019. While fire is certainly not an uncommon end to the various rambling old hotels spread across the mountains of the Northeast, it is perhaps an oddity in its timing, and in the fact that before the fire Pocono Manor was by all reports a healthy, operating business. Before the fire there was even talk of restoring skiing to the menu of amenities the hotel would offer patrons. 

This is not the first private use lost ski area I have visited. In fact they were a quite common casualty of the expansion of larger public ski areas in the region. Pocono Manor was perhaps one of the larger hotel ski operations, and potentially one of the oldest if the manor's preceding use of cross-country ski trails on the grounds are counted, dating back perhaps to the 1920s or 1910s. Downhill, lift accessed skiing was added in the 1960s, at the same time small downhill operations were being added to other competing resorts like Skytop, Mount Airy and Buck Hill. Because of the hotel's location on a ridge extending from the plateau, the ski area was upside down. A small lodge was constructed at the top, just below the hotel itself, and two open slopes were cleared of different lengths with a few narrower interconnecting trails between. Altogether the ski area would include about 350 feet of vertical drop along a moderately steep fall line, which was not too shabby for its day. Lift access was provided by two surface tows: a t-bar along the shorter open slope, and a j-bar which covered the entire vertical from top to bottom. Water was drawn from a creek and pond at the bottom of the ridge. The pond has long since silted itself up into a marsh and the lake house is long gone, but the pump house with abandoned machinery still sits at the bottom of the j-bar lift line. The lift line itself is overgrown but discernible. Most of the infrastructure of the j-bar remains in place, if in an advanced stage of decay. Snow making was used and the hook ups for water, air and electric are present across the mountain. At some point the t-bar was removed and replaced with a rope tow. The haul line and some of the carriers are still in the woods adjacent. Swapping a t-bar for a rope tow may seem like a downgrade, but it appears that at some point near the end of the area's operation the shorter open slope was converted to accommodate snow tubing. This was probably the last activity at the area, which closed sometime in the 1980s, although there is no recorded date for the closing and the tubing run may have persisted into the 1990s. In any case, the slope is open and mowed, and quite steep for what was likely the beginner run. At the top is a cement pad about the size of a small ranch home: all that remains of the lodge.

You get a good sense of the change in scale here; not just in skiing but maybe in a lot of factors of modern living. On one hand you have the country-side idyll of a Tudor-revivaled, English village plopped on top of a forested hill. On the other, the efficiency of prefabricated cement structures indifferently carving their rectangularity down into the landscape. The j-bar line at Pocono Manor provides an illustration: you can reach up and touch the sheave wheels hanging from the towers. Two years after this visit, nearby Camelback mountain resort installed a six-person, high speed chairlift. And, to make sure guests aren't too bothered by the fact of being outside in the winter air during their sub-one minute ride to the top, the resort will place bubble covers on each chair which can be lowered and then, in one smooth motion, raised again before unloading. The lift was installed by helicopters. That, I think represents in bold letters the challenges small ski areas face, and explains why so many smaller ski areas have closed. Not everyone can rent a helicopter for a week.