Engelwood Ski Area
Osceola, Wisconsin1954-1967
Browse Engelwood Ski Area tees, long sleeve tees, hoodies and crewnecks. Everett and Lucille Trulson's hill in the St. Croix bluffs ran its rope tows off old car and truck wheel rims, and loudspeakers played Swiss mountain music over the slopes. Most of the runs have grown back to forest on land the Standing Cedars conservancy keeps open to the public. Choose a style below, then scroll down for the full Engelwood history. We are an American small business bringing back the signs and logos of places and teams that are long gone but remembered fondly.
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Engelwood Ski Area History
Engelwood Ski Area near Osceola, Wisconsin, sat in the bluffs and ravines above the St. Croix River, about seven miles north of Somerset off Highway 35 and two miles west on a town road. Everett and Lucille Trulson of Minneapolis found the spot in 1954 on Guy and Beulah Engelhardt's farm and leased the bluff and ravine land for $100 a year, plus a fee for any hardwood they cut. The name joined the Engelhardt family name with Plenty Wood, the name of their farm. The area's own brochures, patch, tickets and signs all spell it Engelwood; Englewood is a later misspelling.
Everett did much of the clearing and digging himself, and on the Headwall the bulldozer had to be let down the slope on a cable. Their brochure listed four separate areas, ten trails, three open slopes, six rope tows and a 340-foot vertical, with trails named Challe Lane, Alley-Oop, Slalom Slope, Zoomer, Rim Run, Gnomes Gulley and Headwall. The tows ran off old car and truck wheel rims set up on blocks. Early on there were no lights, no grooming and only an outhouse, but loudspeakers played Swiss mountain music over the hills, and the chalet sold hot dogs, hamburgers and cocoa. Ralph "Ram" Matson ran the ski school for most of the area's life.
Arnold Kustritz, a St. Paul electrician, later bought the business and stretched the lease to 1971. With his brother-in-law Jim Solum and mechanic John Bentz he built a T-bar and a J-bar near the chalet, ran homemade snow guns on river water, and groomed with a used Bombardier from Canada. A mid-1960s brochure called Engelwood the ski complex with more variety and billed the Headwall as a run for experts only.
By then Kustritz considered the hill outdated, and Engelwood closed after the 1966-67 season. He began clearing a bigger area just to the south, to be called Mt. Somerset, but new federal riverway protections on the St. Croix stopped the project. The land passed to a group of investors, then in October 1995 to the Standing Cedars Community Land Conservancy, which keeps about 1,100 acres open to the public as its Engelwood unit, a State Natural Area since 2009. Old tow parts still sit in the woods, and most of the runs have grown back to forest.