Lowenberg Ski Area

Lowenberg Ski Area on Lyon Mountain, near Chazy Lake in the town of Dannemora, New York, was a ski resort planned big and built small in the late 1960s. The name, spelled Löwenberg in the developer's own brochure, is German for lion mountain, a play on Lyon Mountain, and its crest showed a roaring lion rising out of a peak. Plattsburgh developers behind it hoped to catch Canadian skiers on their way to the high peaks around Lake Placid.

The plans were enormous. Accounts describe up to thirty chairlifts and fifty trails, and a brochure from the Lowenberg Corporation laid out a 4,400-foot chairlift, a base lodge, a mid station, a Lowenberg Sport Club Hotel, a village site and a 2,200-foot vertical drop from the 3,830-foot summit, with a marina on Chazy Lake below. Bavarian-style chalets were offered from $9,500, bank financed at 6 percent, or as do-it-yourself kits from $2,995.

What got built was one T-bar, a small parking area and three or four short trails with about 250 feet of vertical. After roughly three seasons of on-and-off operation, Lowenberg shut down in 1969 and was soon abandoned, undone by money problems and plans far larger than the hill. The chairlift, hotel and village never came.

The T-bar never left. Its towers still stand in the woods beside the Lyon Mountain trailhead, at the end of what was Lowenburg Road, with the cable strung between them and some T-bars still hanging, and concrete piers mark the top shack. New York State bought most of the mountain in 2008, and backcountry skiers now use the old trails and lift line on their way toward the 1917 fire tower on the summit.