Bear Rocks Ski Slopes

Bear Rocks Ski Slopes, on Bear Rocks Road near Acme and Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, used that name and an Acme, Penna. address on its 1967 letterhead, while its brochures called the whole development the Bear Rocks Ski Village. It sat off Route 31 on the western slope of Chestnut Ridge in Bullskin Township, Fayette County. It began as a lake and lodge colony with cabin lots. Scott Hamilton Realty Co. of Pittsburgh took it over and turned it into a four-season homesite development, with the ski hill as the main attraction for city buyers.

A Pittsburgh Press ad of November 7, 1965, called it the newest and closest mountain ski area to Pittsburgh, 55 minutes out by the Turnpike's Donegal exit. It promised a new double chairlift, slopes and trails, snowmaking and a new lodge at the foot of the hill, along with 100-by-200-foot homesites, a private fishing lake, a swimming pool, a cocktail lounge, tennis and horseback riding. The chairlift was the only one on the hill, a double with wooden seats, and rope tows did the rest. The vertical was about 300 feet.

A brochure from around 1970 named the trails Big Bear, Main Street, Rocky's Run, Snowball, Shortcut and Skytop Trail, with a Touring Trail and a beginner area called Beginner's Paradise. Snowmaking towers ran down the middle of the main slope, and a resident who built a chalet there in 1968 remembered hearing the guns at night. The lodge was a stone and timber building on several levels, with a restaurant upstairs and a bar below.

People who lived there say the hill sat close to 1,000 feet lower than Seven Springs and Hidden Valley, which cost it weeks of skiing at both ends of the season, and that once most homesites had sold the developer struggled to keep managers. The last day of skiing was March 28, 1973, and the property was put up for sale. The lodge later became the Nepenthe restaurant and was destroyed by fire. Houses now stand on parts of the old slopes, and the homesite community kept the name Bear Rocks.