■Willard Basin in New Hampshire: Anchored by hotel-topped Mount Starr King, would lure skiers worldwide with its revolutionary aerial tramway, monorail system, and 2,000-foot wide skiing gulf, clear-cut specifically to rival Tuckerman Ravine.
■Bigelow Resort: With its bustling new international airport, it would transform the sleepy Dead River area of western Maine into “the Aspen of the East,’’ with a two-decade development goal of luring the Winter Olympics.
If the outlandish scope of these commercial plans has you environmentally alarmed, relax. None of them are under consideration.
Yet at one time, these long-forgotten proposals were all considered viable visions of the future for New England skiing.
Grand schemes that now appear audacious with the benefit of hindsight, Borderline, Willard Basin, and Bigelow each reached various stages of planning and construction between 1936 and 1976 before being abandoned. Examining why these resorts never got built reveals how attitudes about the use of public lands shifted as skiing morphed from fad into full-blown industry.
Two-state plan “The year 1936 was a pretty incredible year in many aspects of skiing,’’ said Scott Andrews, curator and research director for the Ski Museum of Maine. Rope tows were popping up all over New England, and ski trains carried thousands of people to small mountain villages not used to — but eager to serve — a winter influx of tourists. “The Great Depression still burned in people’s minds. Skiing was viewed as an economic boon, for sure.’’
The Civilian Conservation Corps had put men to work in the White Mountains cutting trails, and in what would today be considered an unlikely partnership to spur economic growth, the US Forest Service, Appalachian Mountain Club, and the CCC jointly prepared an ambitious blueprint of trails on seven Maine and New Hampshire mountains, with expansion projected onto five additional peaks.
