Pando Ski Center
Rockford, Michigan1960-2015
Order Pando Ski Center tees, long sleeve tees, hoodies and crewnecks. Richard Bresnahan, a 10th Mountain Division veteran, started the rope-tow hill with his brothers. Local accounts call it the first ski area in Michigan to let snowboarders ride every slope, and the Michigan Snowboard Museum says the national championship of snow surfing, the forerunner of snowboarding, moved here in 1980. Browse the styles below, and the full Pando 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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Pando Ski Center History
Pando Ski Center in Rockford, Michigan, was a small rope-tow hill in the woods on Belding Road near Bostwick Lake, north of Grand Rapids. Richard Bresnahan, who had trained with the Army's 10th Mountain Division in World War II, started it with his brothers in 1960, tired of the long drive north to ski. Two history pages say he named it for Pando, Colorado, where the division trained, and one says the brothers built the hill with earth-moving gear from the family's septic tank business. A third account puts the founding in 1962, but the 1960 date appears on more sources.
Pando never had a chairlift. A 1970 newspaper list of Michigan winter sports areas gave it nine slopes, three rope tows and snowmaking, and later write-ups counted six rope tows, seven or eight trails and about 125 feet of vertical. It added tubing early, and local accounts call it the first ski area in Kent County and in Michigan to let stand-up snow surfers and snowboarders ride every slope. The Bresnahans sold it in 1977, and it became Pando Park, later Pando Winter Sports Park.
The hill earned a place in snowboard history. Snurfing, riding a one-board toy for the snow that came out of Muskegon, was the forerunner of snowboarding, and its national championship moved from Blockhouse Hill to Pando in 1980, according to the Michigan Snowboard Museum, which also lists Pando as the site in 1984. Other local accounts say Pando hosted world championships of the sport during the 1970s, and several credit a 1979 contest at Pando as the first competitive snowboard race, won by a snowboard pioneer who was the only rider on a snowboard. The sources disagree on the years and on the event names.
Pando closed for the last time on March 12, 2015. The owners of another ski area nearby bought it that November and kept it shut for the 2015-16 season, saying they hoped to reopen it. By December 2016 it was closed for a second winter, a former groomer said equipment had been moved to the other hill, and no date was given for a return.