Huckins Hill Ski Area

Huckins Hill Ski Area in Plymouth, New Hampshire, stood on a hillside east of the Pemigewasset River, just south of Livermore Falls, above the Boston and Maine tracks that Interstate 93 now roughly follows. It was one of the ski hills started in the 1930s by Fred Pabst Jr., the Milwaukee brewing heir whose company, Ski Tows, began with rope tows in Quebec and then spread into New England. Pabst opened Huckins Hill and a hill at Intervale soon after his Canadian start, and the Plymouth hill was running by the 1938 season.

Its lift was the selling point. Instead of a rope tow, Huckins Hill had an 1,800-foot overhead cable with hooks hanging from it, an early J-bar that the state's winter maps called a hook-type overhead cable tow and that Plymouth's own brochure billed as a Cable Ski Tramway. It is counted among the first overhead lifts in New England. The lift served about 350 feet of vertical and six trails between a quarter and three quarters of a mile long, cut 60 to 100 feet wide on a north-facing slope. A 1939 skiers' guide noted that the hill needed about a foot of snow to open.

Plymouth was a regular stop for the snow trains that carried skiers north from the cities in the late 1930s, and the town promoted its ski hills as a group. A brochure map numbered them: Huckins' Hill first, then Mount Pero, Frontenac and Wendy's Slopes, with directions on to the Cannon Mountain aerial tramway. A hand-painted Snow Conditions board, later found in a Plymouth restaurant, listed Huckins Hill (Cable Tramway) at the top in yellow letters, above Wendy's Slope and Frontenac.

Huckins Hill was still on the state winter map for 1940-41 and closed in the early 1940s, during the war years. Pabst took the lift out, and it is believed to have gone to his new area at Bromley in Vermont. Nothing remains on the hill. It can still be seen from northbound I-93, but the trails have long since grown back in.