Black Mountain embraces its history with the revival of a storied lift

Black Mountain has been a mainstay in the Mount Washington Valley since 1935. (Becky Pingree)

New chairlifts are all the rage this winter. 

Among the installations, Attitash Mountain Resort has replaced the East and West Double-Double chairlifts with a fixed-grip, four person chair. Sunday River will introduce the Jordan 8, billed as “one of the most-advanced chairlifts in the world, and the fastest eight-person chairlift in North America.” Waterville Valley has installed a six-person, high-speed, bubble chairlift that will travel at approximately 20 feet per second, moving 3,200 passengers per hour.

Then there’s Black Mountain in Jackson, N.H., where the only new lift in rotation this season will be one that is nearly 100 years old. 

The oldest operating overhead cable lift in North America is making a comeback this winter as Black Mountain is in the midst of restoring its historic J-bar lift, hoping to utilize it more in the learning section of the ski area. 

“We’re trying to get back to the basics of this is a learning hill,” Black Mountain ski school director Ray Gilmore said. “There doesn’t need to be a high-speed quad on a learning hill. You get to ski up and ski down, and we’re going to have the surface lifts going during the weekends. So people will be able to get up there and ski that piece of history.” 

The lift originally opened as a rope tow in 1935, installed at the Moody Farm on Black Mountain. It has seen few changes over the years. Bill and Betty Whitney purchased the farm and ski area in 1936 and retrofitted the overhead cable lift by replacing the strands of rope that hung from the cable with 72 shovel handles. By 1954, the J-bar was born. In recent years, it’s been taken out of regular rotation, except for the one-two weekends each season when the ski area would celebrate throwback days. 

But when Gilmore came on board last year as Black’s ski school director, he expressed to ski area owner John Fichera the historical importance of re-opening the J-bar on a more frequent basis. 

“It’s classic,” Gilmore said. “It’s part of the history, and with so much history just…not being erased, but being overwritten, it’s a critical thing for our sport.

“The idea was to bring it back to what it was. Keep the oldest lift in America functioning. That’s kind of cool.” 

Gilmore can recall one of his first runs as a child, on the skimobile hill at nearby Cranmore Mountain. Herbert Schneider was the ski school director at the time, inhering the role that his father, the legendary Hannes Schneider, had started in 1939. Gilmore was so amped for the experience that he skied down the hill without a single turn and sprayed the whole group with snow at the bottom. Herbie Schneider was not impressed. 

“Next you know, I was hiking for two weeks because I had lost the right to ride the skimobile,” Gilmore said. 

Today, the snowmobile lift remains an iconic image of Cranmore. Visitors can still find cars littered about at the base of the resort and around North Conway, but the lift itself was torn out in 1990. 

“That’s such a cool thing and it’s something my kids will never have at that resort,” Gilmore said. “Those things disappear.” 

It was watching Teton Gravity Research’s “Pursuit of Soul” — a short film that features Black Mountain, among other independent ski areas throughout New England — last year that gave Gilmore the idea of preserving history at the ski area. “This is what I grew up doing,” he said. “[Jackson] is a small town, no frills. Everybody has got the same chili. Everybody has got the same beers on tap. But it’s not trying to be something that it’s not.” 

Much like in the spirit of the Ship of Theseus, a philosophical experiment that raises the question of whether something that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object, Gilmore admits that Black’s J-bar isn’t exactly the same as it was in 1935. The electrical engine isn’t the original. A steel cable has replaced the original braided rope. The original towers, now steel, were once wooden telephone poles. 

Last month, Gilmore recruited helpers to refurbish the building, erected in the 50s, that houses the lift’s moving parts. “Grab a brush, and I’ll burn a burger for you,” he posted on social media. Beyond a thorough paint job though, he was not sure if the dilapidated lift tower could be salvaged. 

“We’re going to dress it up and make it look nice so when you’re there for that Instagram moment you can say, “Grandad learned to ski here and now you’re going to ski with me on this hill.’ We don’t have that anymore. We don’t.” 

In recent years, Bretton Woods, right up the road from Black, debuted its Rosebrook Lodge, a 16,000-square-foot summit lodge that is as stunning as the views surrounding it. Killington this year will put the finishing touches on its own, new lodge, a 58,000-square foot building that doubles the size of the old K-1 base lodge. 

Those sorts of projects are really cool and put an exclamation mark on anticipation. But they’re also not necessary when it comes to simplifying the sport of skiing. 

“In my opinion, you don’t need a $16 million lodge to slide on snow,” Gilmore said. “You need a rope to bring your [butt] up, something on your feet to carry you back down.” 

Sometimes, it’s just as simple as that. 

Video: Black Mountain on New England Ski Journal TV