Shribman: We should treasure Black Mountain most of all for what it isn’t

The longest-operating ski area in New Hampshire will indeed be operating this winter. (Black Mountain file photo)

The news about Black came out of the blue. And it left me emotionally black-and-blue.

Black Mountain, in Jackson, N.H., was never one of the leading ski resorts of North America. Its lifts were antiquated, its grooming episodic, its lodge primitive, its terrain idiosyncratic. Almost nobody got on an airplane to spend a week at Black Mountain. Almost nobody in recent years even got in a car to spend a day at Black Mountain.

All of those things are why I love the place. All of those things are why the morning I heard the news that Black would not open this year set me into mourning—and why the next week, when the rescue of Black was announced, I felt I had a new lease on life.

Resurrection on a hill in the Mount Washington Valley!

The longest-operating ski area in New Hampshire will indeed be operating this winter. The sweet, little ski town of Jackson, so beautiful in the early hours of a January snowfall, will not be deprived of its decades-long identity. The character of skiing in New Hampshire won’t be altered forever. And the generations of families that found Black Mountain affordable and congenial will still have a chance to add another Jackson generation to their skiing legacy.

“Tons of families have enjoyed the friendly, sunny slopes of Black Mountain,” ski historian Tom Eastman told me the day after the news broke. “This was a place run by families for families. Those of us who are ski enthusiasts and ski historians were sad about the prospect that this might become another of New England’s lost ski areas.”

Skiing today is freighted with frippery and frills. Huge video boards set out the temperature and the presence of groomers. Slopeside restaurants offer gourmet meals at downtown prices. Gift shops are more like boutiques than convenience stores. Lodges are crowded like pre-pandemic subway cars. There are things about modern skiing that are — and I hesitate to type this word about a sport I have enjoyed for more than a half-century—repellent.

But there never was any frippery, and surely no frills at Black Mountain.

No video boards, for sure, and the presence of groomers was (to borrow a line from Porgy and Bess, not ordinarily the soundtrack of a skiing essay) “a sometime thing.” Gourmet meals? You have to be kidding. The gift shop was attached to the snack bar—note that I didn’t call it a “restaurant”—and even I figured the food prices were low enough that there was no reason to slip a PB&J sandwich into the pocket of my parka. You could get a beer at the bar and it wouldn’t set you back like a brew at Fenway. And the one thing you could depend upon was that the lodge (another word that overstates the actual venue) was not crowded. There always was enough room to swing a cat, not that anyone would do so anymore.

I love Black for what it isn’t. It isn’t fancy. It isn’t pretentious. It isn’t even particularly well-run. It is a lot like my car, a 2015 Subaru Forester, which isn’t fancy, surely not pretentious, and doesn’t run all that well. Black Mountain is the sporting equivalent of old-timey music and old-time religion, an old soft-shoe of a ski mountain, an oldie-but-goodie of our winter pastime.

My memories of the place are vivid; The time I told my dad that Whitney Hill, where that old J-bar operated for decades, was so high, so forbidding, and so treacherous, that I could not contemplate skiing it, let alone conquering it. The time I wiggled off the T-bar into a purgatory of snow, thinking that my final hours on earth were nigh. The time I told my brothers that they could drive over to one of the big mountains—maybe Attitash, perhaps Wildcat, even possibly Sunday River—but I was quite content to cruise in the sunshine at Black Mountain. The time when, as a political writer covering the 2020 New Hampshire Primary, I spent the morning on Black Mountain and then attended a candidate event in the afternoon and another in the evening. Neither contender became president. Too bad for them. I had a great day on the Black Beauty and Runaway trails.

“The place is truly beloved,” Jeff Leich, the former director of the New England Ski Museum, told me. “It is always welcoming, and the threat of its closure means that a bit of history might be going away.”

That history includes the installation of one of the first overhead cable lifts. It was one of the first areas to combine skiing with on-site lodging. Although the usual Black Mountain narrative puts its origin as 1935, newly discovered footage shows Carroll Reed—whose name was for decades attached to the premier ski shop in North Conway Village, sitting like a dowager princess where Kearsarge Road meets the White Mountain Highway—skiing on Black’s slopes as early as 1932.

What’s the meaning of all this in a world convulsed in conflict and contention? This whole question of the survival of Black was not all that important, in the great scheme of things. The threat of the extinction of a ski area 5,400 miles from the Middle East was only a minor ripple in an ocean of earthly despair. But amid all the discord and disputes that comprise our earthly worries, Black Mountain remains a small corner of comfort and ease in this fevered planet.

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.