Shribman: North Conway is the talk of the town

Schouler Park in North Conway, N.H., which was named the country's top ski town by USA Today (WiseguyCreative.com)

Better than Stowe, Banff and Jackson Hole. Better than Vail, Steamboat Springs and Taos. Hell, better than Jackson, Lincoln, Bartlett even Bretton Woods. North Conway. The nation’s top ski town.

That’s according to USA Today, citing North Conway’s Mount Cranmore right in town, its location as a springboard to Black Mountain, King Pine and Attitash, and its cozy hostelries that, according to the newspaper, “promise a warm welcome after a winter day outdoors.”

We all know what makes a ski town. Snow, for starters. Welcoming restaurants. Well-stocked bars. A damn good ski shop, maybe three, possibly four. And the thing that North Conway has in surfeit: a ski heritage. You can’t find that, or at least one that is as long and storied as the one within the boundaries of ZIP code 03860, in some of the venues that have (dare we concede this) bigger elevations, longer runs and more luxurious creature comforts.

But, as readers of this column know, it is my conviction that the skiing’s the thing. You can do it — you can do a lot of it — in North Conway, and you will return from a day’s ski outing with the fulfillment of having joined a winter-sport heritage that is at least 87 years old. Take that, Steamboat Springs, where the groundbreaking for commercial downhill skiing came in 1958, almost three decades after skimeister Hannes Schneider decamped in town to bring celebrity and the Arlberg technique to North Conway.

That 1939 arrival recently was commemorated by area school children who witnessed a re-enactment inspired by Elaine Stockbridge, a onetime teacher working for the New England Ski Museum who is determined that the defining events of area history aren’t forgotten. (The Ski Museum, first established at the base of historic Cannon Mountain, recently opened a branch in the middle of North Conway that has perhaps the greatest selection of ski-related gifts in the western world, plus a series of exhibits that are reminders of how deep the ski culture is in the area.)

Consider the history in North Conway, which actually isn’t so much a town as a village inside Conway: The invasion of Europeans stoked by Schneider’s arrival. The invention of the Skimobile, the set of little green and red cars that crept up Cranmore and opened its sunny hills to thousands on weekends. The development of a new concept of ski instruction. The ski trains that originated in New York and Boston and dumped skiers in the middle of town. The development of a series of European-style inns with living rooms stocked with games and puzzles and dining rooms offering the (now largely forgotten but wonderful) Modified American Plan scheme of lodging, breakfast and dinner, sometimes for $7. The marvelous ski store founded by Carroll Reed, the entrepôt not only for boards and boots but for country style clothing with a flair. The peerless service and boot fitting at Stan and Dan’s ski store. A set of restaurants offering hearty food. And, beginning in the 1970s, a series of factory outlet stores. What’s not to like?

For me, as for so many hundreds, even thousands, of visitors, North Conway in winter has been a seasonal carnival, possessed of an unforgettable, magical mix of the accessible and the exotic. The snowfall always seemed heavier, the ski runs seemed more congenial, the sunshine on the South Slope seemed more intoxicating than anyplace else. There developed, at least among our crowd, a rhythm to the skiing. Get up early, of course. Take the lower Skimobile and then the upper Skimobile to the summit. Do a couple of runs on the East Slope, taking advantage of the early sunlight. Then, as the congestion thickened, take the Harvey Gibson trail over to the South Slope and join the late arrivers, already having beaten them to the first tracks, and the second, and the third — in short, the good stuff.

One rule: Never — never — approach the base of the Skimobile between 10 and 10:15. That’s when the hordes of ski school scholars were in line, producing a queue that, in the old days, wound around the base lodge.

Like so many others of a certain age, a certain temperament, and a certain way of looking at our winter sport, all of my early ski memories congeal in North Conway. It is where three generations of my family skied, where countless memories were created, where every member of our family learned, and learned to love, to ski. It is where friends crowded into the Eastern Slopes Inn, the Cranmore Mountain Lodge, the White Trellis Inn, the Kearsarge Inn, the Edgewood Inn, and so many others. It is where we took dates to the movies in the center of town, slipped on the ice on the rink on the ballfield at Schouler Park, downed incomparable submarine sandwiches at Sandwich World, and walked down Main Street as if we owned the place, only to find that what we owned was so much bigger and better, captured by Barbra Streisand, a denizen of Sun Valley, Idaho — a ski town, according to the survey, not nearly as great as North Conway:

Memory, all alone in the moonlight
I can dream of the old days
Life was beautiful then
I remember the time I knew what happiness was
Let the memory live again

North Conway. Best ski town in America. Of course it was. Of course it is.

David M. Shribman, executive editor emeritus of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, did not win his Pulitzer Prize for ski writing. He has skied in 14 states, three Canadian provinces and five countries — and, frequently, after classes at Dartmouth College.