Mount Shasta Ski Bowl

Mount Shasta Ski Bowl near Mount Shasta, California, sat in a big open cirque on the mountain's south side, at the end of the Everitt Memorial Highway. It was built on land leased from the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, with a lodge and parking lot at about 7,800 feet and a double chairlift, the Green Butte lift, that carried skiers above timberline to roughly 9,200 feet. A brochure from 1958 shows the first lift as completed on October 15, 1958, and sources split between 1958 and 1959 for the opening season.

The brochure sold the place as a year-round wonderland and promised more than skiing: a cafeteria, ice rink, sleigh rides, rope tows, a souvenir shop and bus service to the slopes. It also drew a dotted line for a second lift and an enclosed aerial tram that was meant to climb to Shastarama Point at 11,127 feet by 1960. The tram was never built. Advertising called the bowl the largest in the United States, and one account says 6,000 people came in a single weekend in its first month.

Crowds did not make it profitable. One account says the only profitable season was 1962-1963, when more than 40,000 visitors came, and the area kept running at a loss in other years. Then the base lodge burned in 1971. The owners put up a much smaller lodge, and by the mid 1970s the area was marketing itself as Ski Shasta. A 1976 map shows two double chairlifts (Green Butte and Panther Creek), a Penny Royal T-bar, a beginner rope tow and a day lodge.

In January 1978 an avalanche destroyed the Green Butte chairlift. The Ski Bowl closed for good after that, and no lift-served skiing returned to the mountain for years. Today the site is the Old Ski Bowl, a trailhead area where hikers walk up to Green Butte in summer and backcountry skiers come in winter.