Pine Ridge Ski Area

Pine Ridge Ski Area in Barre, Massachusetts, sat on South Barre Road between Barre and South Barre, about half an hour from Worcester. It started in the 1950s as the Barre Ski Tow, a rope tow on a wide, fairly steep slope with a vertical drop of about 180 feet. Bob Anderson bought it around 1950, according to one history, and a skier from the 1960s remembered the heavy hemp rope growing heavier when wet and a lot of falls from it.

The area grew in the middle of the 1960s. Pine Ridge Ski Area, Inc. was formed as a Massachusetts corporation in December 1965, and by 1966-67 it advertised two platter lifts and a J-bar along with night skiing and snowmaking. A T-bar had replaced the rope tow by the late 1960s, taking the vertical to 224 feet, and a second T-bar was added in the early 1970s. Winter carnivals brought a torchlight parade, races and a Miss Pine Ridge contest. In the 1970s Anderson cleared land to the north and bought a used double chairlift for an expansion that would have made it bigger than a nearby rival. Local opposition to rerouting the road stopped the plan, and the chair sat in the parking lot.

Anderson's health failed and the area closed around 1982. The O'Connor family reopened it in 1990 with night skiing, a small snowboard area, a lounge and a lodge known for homemade chowder and chili, and closed it again in 2001. A developer bought the property in 2003, and it reopened that year as Pine Ridge Snow Park, with a remodeled lodge and a sports bar. The lift kept having problems. On March 4, 2006, the T-bar caught fire and was damaged beyond repair, and the area closed for good. A solar array opened on the upper slopes in 2014.