Mt. Hardscrabble Ski Area
Rice Lake, Wisconsin1952-2003
Shop Mt. Hardscrabble Ski Area tees, long sleeve tees, hoodies and crewnecks. Grocer Cap Hagen started with one rope tow, and in 1976 SKI Magazine passed along his claim that the ski patrol swept a trail each morning for wolves. The hill ended in the summer of 2003 when lightning hit the radio tower and the pump house burned. Browse the styles below, and the full Hardscrabble history is further down. 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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Mt. Hardscrabble Ski Area History
Mt. Hardscrabble in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, was a ski hill in the Blue Hills a few miles east of town that ran for about fifty years, from the early 1950s to 2003. It was the work of Casper "Cap" Hagen, a Rice Lake grocer who also ran the Hagen Motel. He started with a rope tow on a single run, and by the time of its 1950s and 1960s postcards Hardscrabble, Inc. advertised a T-bar, eight tows and eleven runs.
Hagen sold the place hard. A 1960s brochure for Hagen's Hardscrabble Ski Resort promised newly enlarged slopes, a lodge with three open fireplaces, an orchestra and a cafeteria, with runs named Big Bear, Big Ed, Big Drop, Moon Run, Tempo and a mile-long Woods Trail above little Cobb Lake. In 1976 SKI Magazine called it Humor Hill and passed along Cap's lines: the hill sat on an iron ore vein with the strongest gravity in the country, and the ski patrol swept one trail each morning for wolves. By then the 350-foot ridge had nine slopes, two T-bars, seven rope tows and 15 miles of touring trails. Its snowmaking drew cold water from a dam on the creek below the chalet, and about a hundred college racers came twice a year for meets.
Later maps add trails called Pine Decline, Run Beautiful and Danger Run, a Governor's Cup race, a chairlift and night lighting by 1985, and a tube park and snowboard terrain park by 2000. In the summer of 2003 lightning hit a radio tower at the top of the hill and the pump house by the pond burned. The owners could not cover the loss without insurance, and the area never reopened.
The land is private. Visitors who filmed the hill with the owner's permission in 2019 found the slopes still open, the snowmaking pond still at the base, and the buildings damaged by vandals.