Kissing Bridge: Turn It Around

It had been snowing pretty consistently in Western New York for about a week and the skiing was good everywhere. South of the city had accumulated about 2 feet of snow over the previous week. I had planned to head out skiing in the morning and we were forecasted for a few possible inches that night.

liftline

I had plans to ski-tour a state forest in Ellicottvile and made my way out of the house. We received a few very light inches of snow in my driveway in Buffalo, which only required a few passes with the shovel. As I hopped onto the highway, the snow intensified pretty quickly.  Traveling into the southtowns on 219, precipitation started to get heavy.

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Holiday Valley: It Snowed Out West

Like the rest of the northeast, we’ve been patiently waiting for winter to arrive here in Western New York. We received our typical early season dump that puts a foot on the ground only to take it away a week or so later. Then we had a slow start with limited snow-making windows.

Firecracker

There have been moments where we thought it was on, a few small storms with a couple inches here and there. There was also the recent storm that dropped 20” in the Buffalo metro area but left the ski areas to the south high and dry. We were all waiting for the weather to send some classic WNY lake effect to the hills.

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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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