![]() I want to share what you have to say."The Trail of the Lonesome Pine" is a popular song published in 1913, with lyrics by Ballard MacDonald and music by Harry Carroll. or Canada or hell Slovenia or Japan, hit me up. If you’re the Mike of some other little ski area in the U.S. ![]() But it’s a good story and I was thrilled when Mike reached out. I’d tried, in the past, to figure it out. ![]() An end-of-the-road bump with an antique website, run largely by volunteers, it’s never been obvious to outsiders who ran Lonesome Pine. The former, after all, are parts of conglomerates and have all the modern communications and marketing infrastructure that comes with that. Mike took me seriously, and I’m glad he did – it’s far easier to track down the GM of Killington or Sugarbush or Sunday River than it is to figure out who runs Titus or Whaleback. I love the Epic Pass and its flagship Western cloud-scrapers as much as I love the cowboy indies like Plattekill and the town bumps like Lonesome Pine. I am here to tell the full story of lift-served skiing in America. I didn’t care how small or remote it was. Lonesome Pine as labor of love the small ski area’s surprisingly robust race program how to transform a 1960s T-bar so it doesn’t jerk its riders up the hill Lonesome Pine’s unique ownership structure the mountain’s huge volunteer squad how Fort Kent supports Lonesome Pine how the tiny ski area stabilized its finances yes it can even get too cold for Maine skiers season passes everyone needs a bar (the kind with alcohol) how a small ski area wrangles something as spectacularly expensive as a replacement groomer how Saddleback’s Cupsuptic T-bar became a pile of parts at the base of Lonesome Pine the caravan that carried the lift across the state trying to figure out the origin of the T-bar that the ski area installed used more than 30 years ago whether the ski area would ever replace the T-bar with a chairlift dreaming of a magic carpet upgrade the possibility of adding tubing and skating to the ski area using volunteers to run the snowmaking operation pushing skiing to April the mountain’s limited operating schedule operating during Covid why the Canadian border closure may have worked in Lonesome Pine’s favor and the expansive and mysterious Canadian ski world.Ī few months back, I put out a call at the end of one of the podcasts: if you ran a ski area anywhere in America, I wanted to talk to you. When Mike reached out to see if I’d be interested in an interview, I agreed immediately. I’ve never skied there, but I’ve long wondered about this humble-brash little mountain that sits quietly in the snowy north, pushing operations into April as larger mountains shut down across New England. It is at once homey and exotic, a snowy town square perched across the street from a neighborhood, north-facing toward the world’s longest frontier. ![]() It’s a simple operation, but one that’s served its community for more than 50 years, and without the bankruptcies and debts and harebrained owners that have sunk operations large and small across New England. The ski area rises directly over the town, 500 vertical feet and a dozen trails and 10 snowguns and a T-bar. John River, across the water from Canada. When you finally get there, you’re reached the top of America. But from the point of view of New England’s largest state, you’re just getting moving: Lonesome pine is another five hours and 40 minutes past Sunday River, five hours 10 minutes past Sugarloaf, and five and a half hours from Saddleback. And if you’ve skied Maine, you’ve probably skied Sunday River or Sugarloaf or Saddleback. If you’ve ever skied Maine, you probably felt as though you’d arrived at the end of the earth. ![]()
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