Intervale Ski Area

Intervale Ski Area in Intervale, New Hampshire, was a small hill in the Mount Washington Valley just north of North Conway, off Route 16A behind the New England Inn and near the foot of the Maple Villa ski trail, a Civilian Conservation Corps run down Bartlett Mountain. It opened in the mid-1930s, when the first lift tows were reaching New England, with one of the early J-bar tows put up by Fred Pabst, who went on to build a bigger ski area in Vermont. Guides from 1939 and 1940 list the Intervale Ski Slope with a 1,500-foot hook tow, a 400-foot drop, several open slopes and lights for night skiing.

Pabst took the J-bar out in 1947 and moved it to his Vermont area. Dick Stimpson, who had worked at the New England Inn and taught skiing to its guests on the slope, took over the area about the same time and ran it for close to thirty years, at first under a lease. A rope tow replaced the J-bar. A 1949 guide lists the rope tow, the Twister Trail, open slopes, a ski jump and a shelter serving hot food, and a sketch map from about 1950 shows the tow, the Twister Trail, the Maple Villa Trail, a 30-meter jump and a warming hut below a pine-topped knoll.

Stimpson later put in a platter lift, 1,800 feet long with about 400 feet of rise. In 1962 he cut a 500-foot starting trail higher on Pine Knoll for college racing, and in 1963 he added twelve towers to the platter lift, stretching it to 2,400 feet, and cut new trails toward the Twister. In 1964 he widened the main slope to the south, and by the next winter the steep outrun of the ski jump had been filled and graded into the slope. The area was mostly a weekend hill for families and racers in its later years.

Bigger neighbors in the Mount Washington Valley drew the crowds, and Intervale had no room to grow. It closed around 1976. The platter lift sat rusting until 1986, when it was taken down for another small New Hampshire area, and parts later went to tows in Amesbury, Massachusetts. The old slopes have grown back into woods and sit on private land.