Postcards from the Rogue Valley

A week before Christmas, Mt. Ashland Ski Resort, 20 miles south of downtown Ashland, kicked off its 2021-22 ski season. 

Opening Day on this small mountain is an outsized affair. Enthusiasts grab every parking space long before the lifts begin to vibrate. By tradition, folks dressed in “onesies” (one-piece snowsuits) ski for $25. Skiers who have not seen each other for months connect, teenagers gather and hoot, younger kids head to ski school, seniors stretch their quads. You may never see the folks you have come to know on the trails on the streets in town, but when you are here, a shared passion for snow sliding creates strong bonds.

This year, inadequate snow had kept the season’s start on ice. Then, in a matter of days, 33 inches of snow fell, including a foot in the 24 hours before opening day (December 18^th). By dusk, an estimated 2,300 skiers had climbed aboard one of the resort’s four chair lifts and carved turns in one of its 44 runs. 

This is Shakespeare country, and the Bard inhabits the terrain here as much as the stages in downtown Ashland. The trails tell the story: Upper Juliet, Lower Romeo, Brutus, Tempest, Ado, Windsor, Ariel, and more, with Upper Balcony (at 7,500 feet) overlooking them all. The day lodge at the bottom of the slope is, you guessed, Elizabethan.

“The skiing and riding is going to be excellent,” Hiram Towle, Mt. Ashland’s General Manager, announced the night before this year’s opening. “We are committed to offering skiing and riding to our community any time we can, and we are ready.”

Ready, too, were the 100 people wearing onesies. 

“A mountain for the people, by the people”

At 7,532 feet, Mount Ashland is the tallest mountain in Oregon west of the Cascade’s chain of volcanic peaks. From the south, it appears as a butte along the Siskiyou Crest, the major east-west mountain ridge in Southern Oregon. From the north, Mount Ashland is visible across the Rogue River Valley—in the day, you see the trails that etch its face and at night, twinkling lights.

Called Siskiyou Peak by early settlers, Mount Ashland acquired its current name from the town’s boosters in the early 1900s, according to the Oregon Encyclopedia. In 1893, when herds of sheep grazing the mountain’s slopes threatened to pollute the water below, residents secured a thirty-six-square-mile Ashland Forest Reserve, banning livestock and preserving the municipal watershed.

During Ashland’s tourist boom in the 1920s, a horseback ride up Mount Ashland was a popular daylong excursion and signing the register at the summit’s fire lookout a point of pride. In the mid 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) built a road from Ashland up to the mountain and farther west along the Siskiyou Crest. 

The CCC’s work included developing a small ski slope. Located 2,500 feet lower than the summit, the slope’s gas-engine-powered rope tow and warming hut energized a group of local skiers—the Rogue Snowmen—who eventually lobbied the Forest Service for a major ski area on the mountain. It opened in the winter of 1963-1964, calling itself “a mountain for the people by the people.”

For three decades, the ski hill weathered financial ups and downs, changing hands from one group of owners to another, until Dorothy Bullitt, the owner in 1991, could not find a new buyer.

A recent article in High Country News picks up the story. 

“Robert Matthews, a local who’d grown up skiing there and had worked at a gear shop nearby since he was a teen, decided to step in. But he didn’t have the $1.3 million needed to buy the ski area. So Matthews decided to take an entirely new approach — one that few ski resorts have done to this day: Go nonprofit. First, he gathered a group of about 35 ski enthusiasts to help him. Second, he developed a pyramid fundraising structure: each person had to find two more people to donate $1,000 each and so on. Matthews asked residents in the town of Ashland, population 17,000, and nearby Medford to ‘vote with their checkbooks. Do you want a ski hill here or not?’ The campaign caught on. The local Rotary clubs helped raise money for the ski area, then-governor Barbara Roberts set aside state lottery funds and agreed to contribute $500,000 to ‘Save Mt. Ashland.’”

In 1992, donations from community members and vigorous fundraising gave birth to the nonprofit Mount Ashland Association, one of several dozen not-for-profit ski resorts nationwide.

First person

Allen Baker, a retired journalist who moved to Ashland from Alaska in 2003, remembers his first opening day, season pass in hand, when he fell on his inaugural run and exited the season on a ski patrol toboggan. Management let him apply his pass to the following year. 

Baker began skiing at 37, spent ten years becoming proficient, and the year he turned 58, he skied 58 days. He’s been a regular at Mt. Ashland since his false start years ago and has long lobbied to extend the skiable acreage.

“It’s a small mountain, the runs are short, the chairlift creaks,” Baker told me, “but there are days when it is magical, when snow-encrusted, wind-blasted trees line the trails. On the tree runs, where the powder hides, it can feel like a walk in the forest. The view of Mt. Shasta from the south ridge is as spectacular as it gets. From the Dream Run, Mt. McLaughlin, to the north, looks huge.”

Stacy Poole, who combines talents as a realtor, soccer coach, massage therapist, and former ski instructor, savors  Mt. Ashland’s proximity. Her two teenaged daughters grew up skiing there. “You can go up for the morning or the afternoon, ski for a couple of hours, and feel like you’ve gotten your family outside, enjoyed the beauty, and exercised too,” she told me. “It’s a win-win.”

A sense of community also ties her to the mountain. When her daughters were younger, but old enough to ski on their own, she would invariably run into someone on the chairlift who would say, “Hey, I just saw your daughter cruising down Upper Pistol with her buddies!” 

This Sunday, a “Bluebird Day” (ski lingo for sunny and cloudless, often after a night snowfall), lured me to Mt. A’s slopes for the first time since moving here. The 365 degree view was stunning and crisp, up the entire Rogue Valley and down the Siskiyous to Mt. Shasta. Seventy-five kids or more, all wearing red parkas, clustered in small groups waiting for ski school to start. 

I invited a handful of kids to finish the sentence, “When I ski, I feel . . .” Ali, age seven, said “I feel like I’m flying.” Wynn, her brother, said “I feel fast and free.” “I feel on top of the world,” nine-year-old Kaya told me.

I asked what made Mt. Ashland special. “You can go down the slopes hardly turning at all,” said Wynn. “You get to be outdoors with your friends, on your own, brave and laughing,” Kaya said. What Ali liked best, she told me, was gulping hot chocolate and cheesy fries in the lodge with her family, as they thawed their feet between runs.

In good times and bad

Consolidations and bankruptcies have hit the ski industry hard. Thirty years ago, there were more than 720 ski areas in the country and now there are 470. The economy has been tough, but climate change has been tougher still, with more precipitation falling as rain, not snow, leading to shortened ski seasons. A recent article in the Washington Post says mountainous states, by 2050, may be nearly snowless for years at a time if greenhouse gas emissions continue unchecked and climate change does not slow.

Part of what makes nonprofit models a good fit for small communities is that locals bring a sense of ownership to their ski hills. Kids who grew up learning to ski on a nearby slope may consider it their alma mater; patrons, by and large, are not far-flung tourists but locals. “I want to keep the mountain alive for generations,” a skiing neighbor told me.

In 2013-14, when unseasonably warm temperatures and sparse snowfall closed Mt. Ashland for the entire season, the nonprofit board turned to the community for help. If Mt. Ashland were a private ski hill, they would have had to refund the season passes they had already sold. But as a nonprofit, operators could ask skiers if they would donate the cost of their passes for a tax deduction. Most did. 

During last year’s pandemic, Mt. Ashland drew the largest number of skiers in its history, despite the fact that no indoor amenities were available other than checking in for lessons and rentals. Guests had to use their cars as their “lodge,” but apparently it didn’t dampen the fun.  (Despite the continuing presence of COVID, the lodge, mini ski shop, and restaurant are open this season.)

“At the end of the day, we are in the uphill transportation business,” General Manager Towle said, “and folks just want that unmatched feeling of sliding downhill on snow.”

For my part, I grew up skiing—first in New England, then California, in Northern Italy where Tony’s sister lives, and with our two boys when they were young. My best friend from my high school, Kathy, who lured us to Ashland, skied with my family when we were teenagers in Southern California. The Sierra’s Mammoth Mountain, with an elevation of 11,053, an average of 33 feet of snow a year, and 3,500 plus acres of skiable terrain was my North Star.

Kathy remains passionate about skiing and many mornings scoots up to Mt. Ashland with her skiing spouse, returning to town for a late breakfast. Fearless on many fronts, I have declined to join her, afraid of breaking a bone after a 20-year skiing hiatus. I stick to the mostly snowless White Rabbit trail through the woods and up the slope behind us. It, too, helps me feel on top of the world.

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