Drumlins: Syracuse’s Lost Ski Hill

Mention the word “drumlin” to most people and the response will at best be a blank stare.

In Syracuse, however, it’s a familiar geological term describing the long, rounded hills left behind by glaciers during the last Ice Age that shape much of the region’s landscape.

Drumlins aren’t unique to that part of the state (they’re found throughout New England and the Upper Midwest); however, conveniently for this article, the term also lends its name to a well-known country club in the area with two golf courses — one public, one private — and a distinctive 1920s clubhouse.

Last spring, I saw that Drumlins Country Club was celebrating its centennial anniversary this year. That brought back a lot of pleasant memories as my family lived on the same street a half mile away in the mid- to late-1960s. My father, a voracious golfer, played there frequently with his friends, while my older brother and I eventually joined a junior golf league.

There’s a tendency to think of Drumlins, or any country club for that matter, as a summer facility with warm-weather outdoor activities: golf, pool, tennis, shuffleboard, bocce ball, etc. Yet for a significant stretch of its history, winter was just as central to its identity. The property was designed not only for fairways and greens, but for snow, ice, and cold – a place that could stay active rather than shut down.

By the mid-1930s, Drumlins had added a small ski slope with a rope tow and skating facilities to keep the place active in winter. Most sources put its vertical drop from the low 100 to mid-100 feet, which would be suitable only for sledding today; however, it was typical of many town hills across the Northeast at the time.

Drumlins’ goal wasn’t to compete with larger ski areas; it was to give people an easy local option to learn how to ski and keep the property in use after golf, swimming, and tennis had shut down for the season. It was just a de-treed slope, a rope tow (and later a J-bar), along with (allegedly) a fair number of European instructors (!). As the late New York State ski historian Russ LaChapelle put it, “Drumlins wasn’t a strict ski area or even a ski center; it was simply a place to ski.”

That distinction matters because what Drumlins offered wasn’t terrain variety but access and immediacy. You didn’t plan a trip or check conditions — you showed up, grabbed the rope tow, and skied. The slope was short, but the rhythm was the point: up, down, up, down, and repeat until you were cold enough to stop for hot chocolate.

How important was that small ski hill to people growing up in the 1950s and 60s? A massive thread on the Nostalgic Syracuse Facebook page with more than 250 comments offers a clear answer. “You’d grab the rope tow and just keep going,” one person recalled. “It wasn’t fancy, but it didn’t need to be.”

Skating shows up repeatedly in those memories, less as a formal activity and more as a constant backdrop. “I practically lived on those rinks in the winter,” one person wrote, while another remembered that “there were so many people skating at night – it felt like the whole city was there.” Together, the ski hill and rink (both lit at night) made the place feel less like a club and more like shared public space.

By the 1960s, that model started to lose ground. Larger, lift-served mountains in Central New York like Toggenburg, Labrador, Song, Greek Peak, and Snow Ridge, as well as bigger ones in the Adirondacks began to draw skiers away, and the small hill at Drumlins gradually saw less traffic.

Syracuse University acquired the property in 1969, by which point the ski operation was already fading. In 1976, its final season of operation, an advertisement in Ski Magazine showed lift tickets costing $2.50 at night, $3 on weekdays, and $4 on weekends (inflation-adjusted to $13, $16, and $21 respectively).

That arc lines up with a broader pattern across the Northeast where small local ski hills gradually disappeared as the industry consolidated and expenses proliferated. Drumlins is a particularly clear example because it was never trying to be a ski resort – just a practical, year-round community facility that adapted to the terrain it sat on. The fact that Drumlins’ winter program remained active for roughly four decades is impressive.

It’s interesting to remember that skiing didn’t always mean heading to a mountain with 1,000+ vertical feet. Sometimes it was simply a case of finding a hill, grabbing a rope tow (Drumlins’ was known as a notorious glove eater), and taking as many turns as you could before getting bored and heading home. From the beginning, Drumlins made sure there was a place to do that within Syracuse’s city limits.

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Photo 1: Historic Drumlins ski hill, photo courtesy of Syracuse University
Photo 2: Vintage Drumlins Country Club promotional postcard
Photo 3: Historic Drumlins ski slope photo
Photo 4: Historic Drumlins skating rink photo courtesy of Syracuse University
Photo 5: Google Street View, October 2025