Suicide Six Pilgrimage

The second coolest thing about Suicide Six is it’s name. Suicide Six. It sounds gnarly and dangerous. According to legend, it got its name when the original owner was contemplating moving his rope tow from a smaller, low pitch parcel across the road. Somebody looked at the steep face of hill number six and declared that trying to ski it would be suicide. That’s a great story.

Suicide Six

The coolest thing about Suicide Six is that it’s where lift served skiing began in the United States, all the way back in the nineteen thirties. It’s the site where the engine from a Model T Ford was re-engineered into a rope tow for the first time – in the United States at least.

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The Ski Wing Murders

I learned about the Ski Wing Murders in a roundabout way. This summer we’ve been working on the NYSkiBlog Guide, our directory of all kinds of historical data. One goal is to make progress on our Western NY Ski Areas section during this offseason.

In the process, we’ve come across information about some great looking NY ski areas that are now gone. Places with Holiday Valley vertical and more than 100 inches of snow in an average year. This peaked our curiosity.

This story is about a NY ski area that was best known as Ski Wing, even though the area had three different names from 1958 to 1993. The story is both tragic and incredible.
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Gore Mountain Reopens the Hudson Trail

As announced earlier this season on Facebook, Gore Mountain is working this summer to reopen the original Hudson Trail on Town of Johnsburg land at the North Creek Ski Bowl.

Hudson-Trail-Entrance

The reborn trail leaves the current lift line at Tower 13 and makes it’s way down little Gore Mountain roughly parallel to 46er, rejoining the trail at Tower 4. There are will be couple of exits back to the lift at Tower 9 and Tower 7.

It’s a fall line trail with naturally banked turns that will require minimal earth moving to complete. We spoke to Mike Pratt Gore GM about this project in the last few days.

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