Craigmeur Ski Area

Craigmeur Ski Area in Newfoundland, New Jersey, on Green Pond Road in Rockaway Township, traces to 1937, when Hugo Meury bought the land and started a small hill with a single slope and a rope tow for family and friends. According to local historian Elizabeth Holste, the name combined his surname with that of his wife, Helen Craig. Once the hill opened to the public it grew quickly, and Holste credits it with New Jersey's first rope tow and the state's first ski area. In 1942 someone strung white Christmas lights down one slope for night skiing, and by 1955 it was using early snowmaking equipment.

Craigmeur became a popular place to learn. A 1966 ad in a Wayne-area paper pushed night skiing every night, seven learn-to-ski clubs of up to 60 members each, a T-bar, rentals, a restaurant and a cocktail lounge, 12 miles from Wayne. Holste writes that at one time there were 65 instructors and that lessons came in five-ticket books that could be used over weeks or all in one day. Two ski jumps stood here between 1963 and about 1967: the first was wrecked by wind, and the second burned when a fire started beside it in the lodge. Dorothy Murray and her first husband took over operations in 1965, and she stayed long enough to be called the longest-serving ski area owner in the state.

The hill itself was modest. A trail map from the mid-1980s lists a 1,500-foot chairlift, an 1,100-foot T-bar and two rope tows of 800 and 950 feet, with the rental shop, cafeteria and restaurant and lounge at the top of the hill. Sources give the vertical drop as anywhere from 150 to 270 feet. In the late 1970s the owners added picnic and party facilities, plus children's rides, a pool, tennis courts and ball fields, so the property worked in summer too.

Skiing ended in 1998 by most accounts, though one ski-history table says 1997. Holste blames the energy crisis of the 1970s, a run of warm winters, rising insurance and competition from larger mountains. The picnic and party grounds kept going afterward. Holste says Murray sold the property to the Morris County Park Commission in 2005, and the site today is a 70-acre county recreation complex, available by permit, that still carries the Craigmeur name.