— by Beatrice Burack

Hanover, NH 3/6/24

Introduction: A Century of Changes and a Future of Unknowns

For people who love winter sports in New Hampshire, this has been a trying winter. Lake Winnipesaukee’s annual Pond Hockey Classic had to be moved for the second year in a row because the ice was too thin. Pond hockey tournaments elsewhere were cancelled outright. Ice fishermen on some lakes haven’t even bothered setting up shanties because of thin ice.

Skiers fared no better. As a warmer-than-usual February turned to March, at least three New Hampshire ski areas had to close to preserve snow depth. Cross-country ski areas throughout the region tried valiantly to make the best of scant snow and warm temperatures, but it’s been a slog since mid-December—when the Jackson Ski Touring Foundation would normally have been hoping for base snow and a robust season, it was dealing with dramatic flooding instead.

What seems clear is that climate change is no longer a problem of the future. Its effects are different across the state, says State Climatologist Mary Stampone—sea level rise and flooding on the Seacoast, for instance, or extreme summer heat in southern parts of the state—but for the Lakes Region and northern New Hampshire, the most dramatic changes are occurring in the fall and winter. They’re affecting both the winter economy and, more than anything, the sports that generations of Granite Staters and visitors grew up loving.

For no sport is that more true than for skiing. This is no small deal. While it’s safe to say that New Hampshire is past its heyday as the capital of American skiing, the torch long ago having passed to states like Colorado, the sport still figures prominently in New Hampshire’s tourism industry, culture, and history. According to a 2019 study, the ski industry as a whole contributes roughly $500 million annually state’s economy and generates about 10,000 jobs. The changes it’s contending with now will shape the state and its people well into the future.

Skiers explore Jackson XC’s one kilometer of man-made snow on December 31st, 2023. All photos by Beatrice Burack.

But what are those changes? To some extent, the history of skiing in New Hampshire is a tale of one long series of adaptations: to changing tastes, changing demand, changing technology, and changing economics—and to a changing climate. New Hampshire ski areas have dealt with low-snow years for decades. But the big question skiers confront now is different from what’s come before: What happens when low-snow years are no longer anomalies, but the norm? That’s what this series of articles is about.

A starring role in the history of American skiing

When skiing came to North America on the wings of Scandinavian immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th-century, it landed in New Hampshire, where the formation of the Dartmouth Outing Club in 1909 helped propel the sport to national prominence. In his 2007 book The Culture and Sport of Skiing, historian John B. Allen described Dartmouth as “the fulcrum around which eastern Americans learned to ski.” Dartmouth students learned ski techniques from Norwegian loggers settled in Berlin, NH, and from British ski manuals. They and other northeastern collegians took a passion for skiing with them after graduation, going on to found groups such as the Appalachian Mountain Club, the Dartmouth Outing Club of Boston, and the Sierra Club, all of which further spread the fascination with sliding down slippery slopes on planks of wood.

The state’s tourism industry smelled opportunity in the 1930s. Peckett’s Inn on Sugar Hill was quick to grab the trend, says New England Ski Museum Executive Director Tim Whiton. Whiton explains that tourist spots like Peckett’s used to only have customers in the warmer months, until they realized skiing might be a way to entice their clientele to visit year-round.

Today, Peckett’s serves as a wedding venue and no longer offers skiing, but Whiton says it deserves credit for hosting the state’s “the first real authentic ski school,” complete with an Austrian ski teacher.

Peckett’s Inn on Sugar Hill hosted New Hampshire’s first ski school. Card image from a local family history blog, where you’ll also find more history of the inn.

It was in the ‘30s that skiing truly took off across the state, with rope tows appearing in many communities. “It starts to become, really, this winter sport,” Whiton says.

In addition to small mom-and-pop rope tows, some areas added T-bars. Other took even bigger leaps forward. Cranmore added its famous skimobile—miniature cable cars on a wooden track that pulled skiers up the hill in 1938. Cannon opened its aerial tramway, the first like it in the country, that same year.

By the ‘50s, there was a veritable “explosion” of ski areas, Whiton says. Another ski boom followed in the ‘60s, which Whiton attributes to rapidly changing technology like ski lifts and better grooming equipment “that lets people ski longer, higher, steeper, more technical terrain.” It also coincided with the baby boomers’ introduction to skiing.