It might be hard to make the case that American skiing began in this valley, but surely from the steam train days of the late 1930s through the next three decades, as New Englanders began to fully embrace outdoor winter sports, Mount Washington Valley was where it was happening at full speed.
Those origins might even be narrowed further to the open slopes of Mount Cranmore in North Conway, where, 70 years ago this winter, one of the most significant ski trains in US history arrived at the station just across from the green.
The concept of ski trains may have started a decade earlier in Canada’s Laurentians, and then were implemented in New England as a way to rebuild faltering ridership on the Boston & Maine Railroad. But the response from Hartford to Providence to Boston showed just how ready a population pent up by the Great Depression was ready to break out and have some new fun.
According to B&M records, five trains arrived at North Conway carrying 4,000 skiers for a single Sunday of skiing, starting at Cranmore’s Skimobile - a series of open cars on a track that ran to the top of an open slope.
“On our staff there’s a feeling of a rite of passage here at Cranmore,’’ said Ben Wilcox, the resort’s general manager who grew up in the valley, then worked for a decade at Bretton Woods before returning to Cranmore.
“That is, that we’re holding up a tradition that began in the late ’30s by Hannes Schneider, who had been director of skiing for the entire country of Austria before he came here and really taught the world to ski. That really resonates even today. People are just very aware of our history.’’
Indeed. Though it happened in 1939, Schneider’s arrival in North Conway after he escaped the Austrian Nazis turned into the granddaddy of all ski trains, the publicity giving a huge boost to the relatively new sport.
