Some of the northern Adirondacks' most beloved ski areas have sadly not survived the test of time despite the pristine powder found from the High Peaks to the St. Lawrence. Even after hosting the Winter Olympics twice, Lake Placid hides fourteen abandoned ski areas. In the Whiteface area, the once-prosperous resort Paleface, or Bassett Mountain, succumbed after a series of bad winters. Juniper Hills was "the biggest little hill in the North Country" and welcomed families in the Northern Tier for more than fifteen years. Big Tupper in Tupper Lake and Otis Mountain in Elizabethtown defied the odds and were lovingly restored in recent years. Jeremy Davis of the New England/Northeast Lost Ski Areas Project rediscovers these lost trails and shares beloved memories of the people who skied on them.
Jeremy Davis grew up in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, and learned to ski at Nashoba Valley. In the 1990s, he skied frequently in southern Vermont and began to explore the lost ski areas in that region. He founded the New England Lost Ski Areas Project (www.nelsap.org) in 1998 and graduated from Lyndon State College in Lyndonville, Vermont, in 2000 with a degree in meteorology. He has served on the board of directors of the New England Ski Museum since 2000 and is employed as a senior meteorologist at Weather Routing Inc. He is also the author of Lost Ski Areas of the White Mountains. Residing in Saratoga Springs, New York, Davis remains a frequent skier in southern Vermont today.