Sky Line Ski Area

Sky Line Ski Area in Friendship, Wisconsin, sat a quarter mile northwest of town in Adams County, about 25 miles north of Wisconsin Dells. The Midwest Lost Ski Areas Project dates the area from 1960 to 2003, with a vertical drop of 335 feet. A 1976-77 brochure names Alex and Evelyn Ginter as its owners and managers, under the company name Sky Line Ski Area, Inc., and a 1974 SKI magazine write-up said the Ginter family, including their daughter Karen and son Dana, ran the place and had built much of it by hand.

The hill was small but fully equipped. By the 1974 magazine's account it had two chairlifts, a double and a triple, installed in recent years, plus three rope tows, and the whole area was covered by snowmaking. The brochure lists seven groomed runs, night skiing on Friday and Saturday evenings, cross-country trails, a ski school, a rental shop and a ski patrol, with a chalet that had been enlarged for a dining room and a bar. A weekend lift ticket for an adult cost $7.50 in 1976-77. The magazine described the hill's kids' slope as one where anyone up to age 70 could ski for a dollar.

Later brochures add a new tube run and snow park in 1995 and trail names such as Avenger and Suicide. The Midwest project lists the area as closed in 2003, a date that rests on that one source here. The old base buildings and the chairlifts were still on the property in the 2020s, when it was listed for sale as a restaurant and ski hill on about 168 acres, and the sale flyer notes a cell tower lease running to 2043.