Ski Big Tupper
Tupper Lake, New York1960-1999
Shop Ski Big Tupper tees, long sleeve tees, hoodies and crewnecks. A 1970s trail map for Mount Morris listed a 3,050-foot double chair, a T-bar and a beginner lift, with night skiing on Wednesday and Friday and adult tickets at $6.50. Volunteers reopened the hill in 2009 and ran it until a lift rollback shut it on February 16, 2015. Pick a style below, then read the full Big Tupper history 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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Ski Big Tupper History
Big Tupper Ski Area in Tupper Lake, New York, ran on Mount Morris, a 3,136-foot peak in the hamlet of Moody, and billed a vertical drop of about 1,150 feet, among the biggest in the state. Tupper Lake had skied on smaller hills first: Manning's Hill for a season in 1939-40, then Sugar Loaf beside the golf course in the 1940s and again from 1957 to 1960. The operators wanted more vertical, so they moved up to Mount Morris. Sources split on the start, with the town's tourism site and NYSkiBlog saying 1960 and the town's history pages saying the lifts first ran in 1962.
The town owned and ran the hill into the late 1980s. A 1970s trail map listed a 3,050-foot double chair, a 2,800-foot T-bar and a 600-foot beginner lift, with night skiing on Wednesday and Friday, adult tickets at $6.50 and Ed Fletcher as manager. Trails ran from Crosscut to Cruiser, Skidway and Logger. A volunteer ski patrol worked the hill for decades; one member, Jim Kucipeck, joined as a junior in 1962 and patrolled until 1989. After the town sold the area in 1987, a 1985 brochure listed a second chairlift. A 1997 brochure counted five lifts and 30 trails, added a snowboard park and carried a round Ski Big Tupper logo with the line Better Than Ever.
The mountain closed in 1999, with one news report saying 1998. It changed hands several times afterward. A buyer in the early 2000s sold off nearly all of the snowmaking equipment, and a plan for a luxury home resort never got built. Volunteers reopened Big Tupper in 2009 and kept it running until its last day of operation on February 16, 2015, when a lift rollback shut it for the season.
Franklin County foreclosed on the property for unpaid taxes, and in November 2024 two New Jersey buyers won it at auction with a bid of $650,000. They said they wanted to open it to the public again, possibly with the town. Town officials said restoring it for alpine skiing would cost millions, and the mountain was not open to the public when this was written.