I never skied there. Everything I have to share is hearsay.
In it's heyday, BT seemed like a normal local family+ place. I'd be very curious to know the percentage of skier visits that wouldn't be considered local. My guess is it was mostly local and north country. When WAS the BT heyday?
@Endoftheline
Harv, Sorry for the delayed response, been lets say under the weather recently.
The new owners are saying all the right things to appeal to the locals, getting the mountain opened back up was always the carrot the ACR guys were dangling, but never really had any intention of running it themselves.
I've met one of the owners a few years ago. From what I've gleaned through the local grapevine the one owner may be a skier but certainly not a hardcore. He has 5 kids too and obviously is well funded.County records show that he bought 4 properties in the past 4 years for a total of $2.4M and has pumped at least another $1M into one of those.
I don't know what questions I would ask him other than(sarcastically) Do you know what your getting into?
As for Big Tupper in it's heyday it was the real deal in northern NY in the 60s and 70s. Lots of day visits from the St Lawrnce Valley towns. Good contingent of Canadians also. Litterally overflow crowds at time w busses filling the parking lots.
There was a good ski school, full rental shop at the base, night skiing 3 nights a week w a friday night fun race league.
Annual jumping contest, I'll try to attach a photo a friend sent me. Local school would provide a bus in the afternoons to bring kids up to the mountain to get a couple hours of skiing in during the weekdays. Back in the mid to late 60s they would even have easter parades w costumes and games. Back then, more often than not we had enough natural snow for Easter activities.
It was going so well that in the early 70s the town (who owned it) put a really big addition on the main lodge (adding debt too) as they had seen the crowds big enough to warrant it. Then after a couple bad snow years (1980 the worst) in the early 80s the town put in snowmaking on the one main Chairlift at the base, and a built a small reservoir, Again, more debt to go with it.
So after a few more mediocre winters a group of non skier locals convinced the town to sell the area as they felt they were paying to much in their taxes subsidizing a small group of skiers. The reality was that the town wasn't losing money on it. Some years they made a small progit, other years maybe lost a little. In the end around 1987 they sold it to the hot dog king of Atlantic city Roger ???? who promplty ran it into the ground as he had no inking whatsover about running a ski area.The area then went to auction and the last owners put in a lot of new snowmaking(and took on debt) and gave up after 7 years. No need to expand on that. We all know what the ACR scammers did to the place(sell off, canabilize)
So now we have 2 new owners from NJ. I wish them well, it's a shame that a whole generation of kids have missed out on having a ski area in their back yard. Maybe w some luck the new guys get it up and running even on a smaller scale to start, maybe try to keep ticket prices down enough to attract people. Lord knows the price of day tickets is keeping a lot of people form heading to many of the bigger areas. We need these little feeder hills to keep the sport going.
