Ski Blue Marsh

Blue Marsh Ski Area in Bernville, Pennsylvania, sat in North Heidelberg Township about ten miles north of Reading. It began in 1968 under other names. Berks Nostalgia calls it the North Heidelberg Ski Slope, while a DCSki reader and a ski-history blogger call it the Heidelberg Ski Club or Mount Heidelberg and tie it to John Guenther Jr., who owned a nearby country club. A T-bar went up in 1969. The hill was small, with perhaps 250 to 315 feet of vertical depending on the source, and the early lodge was a modest building with ski rentals run from an attached trailer.

In 1986 Joseph Aichholz Jr. and four partners leased the area, and it became Blue Marsh by 1987, a name that echoes Blue Marsh Lake, the Army Corps of Engineers reservoir on the Tulpehocken Creek just down the road. A triple chair, a rental office, a new base lodge and snowmaking followed. A 1989-90 brochure shows ten slopes, a T-bar, a triple chair and two beginner lifts, with trails named Main Street, Jug Handle, Lost Dutchman and Blue Marshmallow. It billed itself as southeastern Pennsylvania's premier learn-to-ski center and said the area had been involved with snowboarding from the beginning, claiming the first halfpipe in the state. The slogan on the cover was Ski It To Believe It.

Tubing slopes opened in 1993 and grew in 1999, and a 2003 trail map lists a Big Tube park, a Kinder Tube park and a raft park. A weekday all-day ticket cost 25 dollars that year. Money was tight along the way. By 1995 the area had defaulted on a loan and was close to a sheriff's sale, but it kept going for about another decade.

The owners closed it in 2005, blaming warmer weather, property taxes and the rising cost of equipment. A public auction on October 29, 2005 sold the snow cats, T-bars, tubes, lighting and rental gear. A ski-history blogger says the last operating season was actually 2003-04. Developers have proposed houses more than once, and rezoning has been argued over since, but nothing has been built. A 2020 reader reports a field with lift foundations and the old T-bar operator's shack still standing at the top.