Journeys : Skiing Old Trails of the New Deal

Written By Unknown on Selasa, 19 Februari 2013 | 17.35

David Goodman

Skiing the Gulf of Slides in New Hampshire.

I climbed the final few feet to the top of the slope and turned around just in time to watch the last rays of sun set the town of Adams aglow, 2,000 feet below. I had arrived at the base of Mount Greylock, Massachusetts' highest peak, on a gorgeous, bluebird January afternoon, just a few days after a storm had dumped a thick coating of fresh powder across New England. And I had made good time skinning up the trail.

But one glance at the rutted maze of crisscrossing tracks all around told me that, in the race that mattered most, I had arrived much too late.

My quarry was, as the first-track backcountry seekers like to say, all "skied off." The secret of the Thunderbolt Trail had been long since revealed.

I had been warned. "Back in 2001 you might see two or three people on a weekend," Blair Mahar, a co-founder of the Thunderbolt Ski Runners, a local club that has revitalized the trail, had said. "It's not uncommon on a Saturday to see 50 to 80 people up there, even with no new snow. It's become a go-to spot."

Those weekend adventurers, riding a surge of interest in backcountry skiing, may not realize it, but they have the Great Depression to thank for those fresh tracks. The Thunderbolt is one of more than a dozen semi-hidden gems tucked throughout the hills of New England, the legacy of a trail-cutting frenzy conducted in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, a signature program of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.

From 1933 until 1942, the C.C.C. deployed almost 3 million unemployed men between the ages of 18 and 25 across the nation to plant trees, hew trails and build roads, bridges and park structures. Workers lived in camps run by the Army, were clothed and fed, and received $30 a month. Communities across the country benefited from new state parks and infrastructure.

The program also helped catalyze the nascent ski industry in the United States. Many New England ski resorts were built around trails first cut by the C.C.C. "In the scope of what the C.C.C. did, it was a real drop in the bucket," said Jeff Leich, director of the New England Ski Museum. "And yet you think about Cannon, Wildcat, Stowe and what that's meant for the economy of the region." The winter tourism industry they helped spawn remains an important source of revenue throughout Vermont, New Hampshire and the Berkshires.

Thunderbolt's arc is similar to that of many of the trails. It was one of the premier skiing venues in the nation in the 1930s and 1940s, drawing up to 5,000 people to watch top skiers like Dick Durrance hurtle past them on seven-foot-long wooden skis. It was maintained into the 1950s, but grew back in as lift-served skiing grew in popularity, until backcountry enthusiasts started trimming it again in the 1990s.

On that afternoon last month, almost 80 years after the C.C.C. carved the Thunderbolt out of Mount Greylock's birch glades, I was about to ski the first of four trails I would explore over six days, in a backcountry circuit that was equal parts New Deal history tour and time-travel journey back to the birth of skiing in America.

Thunderbolt was a promising start. In a nod to its series of banking twists and sudden airy drops, the trail was named after a famous roller coaster at Revere Beach north of Boston. As soon as I dropped into the first pitch, I understood why. I linked a few wide turns down the aptly named Big Bend, and then doglegged hard right, jump-turning over a series of ledges — the Steps — and plunging into an infamously narrow tunnel through the trees known as the Needle's Eye. The cover was thin in places, scratchy and fast, so I held an edge to bleed some speed before I made a hard left into the next steep section, after which another left took me down through a series of sharp ramps known as the Bumps, to a bobsled-like runout snaking above a creek.

Panting and hunched over my poles, I glanced at my watch. Including two stops to adjust boot buckles and snap a photo, it took me more than 10 minutes to reach the trailhead at the base of the mountain.

Dick Durrance would not have been impressed. On Feb. 17, 1935, Durrance, a Dartmouth skier, won the Massachusetts State Downhill Championship, the first official race on the trail (which was four-tenths of a mile shorter at the time) in just 2 minutes and 48 seconds.

FOUR DAYS LATER I arrived at the base of Mount Mansfield in Vermont to tackle another C.C.C. classic with my friend Ashley Morton. Before there was Stowe Mountain Resort, there was a network of trails built by C.C.C. crews stationed at Ranch Camp, an old logging camp at the southeast foot of the mountain. In 1934, they cut the Nose Dive Trail, which ultimately became the centerpiece of Stowe's terrain on the east side. But Ashley and I had our sights set on the Bruce Trail. Snaking down the sunnier southeast side of Mansfield, it was the first run that a local engineer named Charlie Lord designed before going on to lay out much of Stowe's network.


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