Chickley Alp Sign Ski Area
Hawley, Massachusetts1937-1979
Shop Chickley Alp Sign Ski Area tees, long sleeve tees, hoodies and crewnecks. The Hawley, Massachusetts, hill ran as many as seven rope tows, including a two-way tow called the chow line between the warming hut and the snack bar. A T-bar did not arrive until the 1967-68 season. With no snowmaking, thin winters wore it down, and the 1978-79 season was its last. Pick a style below, and the full Chickley Alp history is further down. Every shirt is printed to order in the USA and carries the memories of bygone places and teams.
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Chickley Alp Sign Ski Area History
Chickley Alp Ski Center in Hawley, Massachusetts, sat at the foot of Hawks Mountain beside the Chickley River on Route 8A, a few miles up from Charlemont, the town its ads and trail maps gave as its address. John Basciano, from Italy, and his Swiss-born wife Josephine went looking for a place to build a Swiss-style ski hill and bought a farmhouse and 210 acres there in May 1937. They put in a rope tow and a small warming hut, hired Hans Thorner to run the ski school, and opened on December 19, 1937.
Snow trains made it a destination. The first one reached Charlemont in January 1938 with about 450 skiers from Connecticut, and local farmers met the trains with horse and ox sleighs to haul skiers the last two miles to the slopes. A ski jump, a toboggan slide and the Hawks-Joch Run, a trail down from the summit of Hawks Mountain, followed the next winter. The 1943-44 season was called off for lack of gasoline.
Joseph A. Graham, a New York businessman, bought the area in 1946 and ran as many as seven rope tows, including a two-way tow called the chow line that carried skiers between the warming hut and the snack bar. Trails had names like Parsenn, Landry, Blitzer and the Snow Bunny beginner slope, on a vertical drop of about 300 feet. The tows ran on car engines, and skiers were sometimes asked to bring the gasoline. Everett Peabody bought the area in 1959 and added proper bathrooms.
Richard Desmarais, an oil dealer from Chicopee, bought Chickley Alp in 1964 and ran it with his family and partners. They built a block lodge with a fieldstone fireplace and, for the 1967-68 season, put in a T-bar, the first lift there that was not a rope tow. The hill billed itself as the family ski area and drew a few hundred skiers on a good day, but it had no snowmaking, and a run of thin winters wore it down. The 1978-79 season was its last. The slopes stayed bare the next winter, the ski shop held a going-out-of-business sale, and the area never reopened. The T-bar was later sold, the trails have grown in, and the base lodge is now a private home.