Poco North Ski Area
Hawley, Pennsylvania1960s-c. 1973
Order Poco North Ski Area tees, long sleeve tees, hoodies and crewnecks. The ridge above Lake Wallenpaupack ran a double chair and a T-bar, with runs named Big Paupack, Stourbridge Lion and Irving Cliff. Skiers who wrote in decades later remembered the large round fireplace in the middle of the lodge's main room. Browse the styles below, and the full Poco North history is further down. Down Home Apparel is an American small business remembering the best places and teams of yesteryear, and every shirt is printed to order in the USA.
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Poco North Ski Area History
PocoNorth Ski Area near Hawley, Pennsylvania, sat on a north-facing ridge about two miles west of town, off U.S. Route 6 in Wayne County, just north of Lake Wallenpaupack. Its own patch spelled the name Poco North, with In the Poconos beneath, and its trail map sign set it as poco · North. Skiers remember it running by the mid-1960s, though no source gives an opening year.
A 1969 ski atlas listed 416 feet of vertical, a double chairlift, a T-bar, two tows, two slopes and four trails, night skiing and snowmaking. The trail map sign at the lodge, from about 1970, shows the double chair climbing the center of the hill with a T-bar beside it and a double rope tow on a separate learning slope that was a long walk from the base. Its runs took local names: Gravity Hill and Nemanie for novices, Big Paupack and Stourbridge Lion for intermediates, Irving Cliff as the advanced run, Wangum Trail, and a Ski School Rendezvous. Irving Cliff and the Stourbridge Lion both come from the history of nearby Honesdale.
The base lodge was the part people remembered. A 1960s postcard shows a broad, low-roofed lodge at the foot of open slopes with a full parking lot beside it, and skiers who wrote in decades later described a large round fireplace in the middle of the main room. School ski clubs came for night skiing.
PocoNorth closed in the early 1970s; one skier who went there remembers the end coming around 1973, and another thought it lost out to Paper Birch, the smaller area on the south side of the lake that later became Tanglwood. The lodge burned after the area closed. A visitor in 2005 found its stone pillars still standing, along with lift footings, a length of haul rope with grips attached and grown-in trails, and later accounts say a private home now stands on the property.