Overview
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Imagery: USGS The National Map · Terrain: Mapzen, USGS and others
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Birch Haven, first known as Suicide Hill, stood on County Road C midway between Sauk City and Baraboo, about a mile and a half west of the Badger Ordnance Plant. The Midwest Lost Ski Areas Project dates it from 1954 and gives it 278 feet of vertical.1
Read the whole historyTimeline
2 events · swipe
Memories
Skied Birch Haven, or worked there?
Tell us what you remember, or what this page has wrong. Memories show here, credited to you, after we read them; facts are checked against a source before they change a figure.
Lost near Birch Haven
The closest other lost ski areas, as the crow flies.
- Opened 1941 · 7.1 mi away · WisconsinA rope-tow ski hill near Devil's Lake State Park outside Baraboo, opened as Alpine Hill in 1941 and later run by Chicago's Windy City Ski Club.
- Years not yet collected · 13.6 mi away · WisconsinA small ski hill with a J-bar on the Lakeland Hills golf course in Lodi, which MWLSAP dates, with question marks, to about 1972–1974.
- 1966–1982 · 16.2 mi away · WisconsinA ski area two miles west of Arena, about 30 miles northwest of Madison, that MWLSAP dates from 1966 to 1982.
History
Written by aurora.ski from the 2 pages below, each sentence numbered to its sources.
Birch Haven, first known as Suicide Hill, stood on County Road C midway between Sauk City and Baraboo, about a mile and a half west of the Badger Ordnance Plant. The Midwest Lost Ski Areas Project dates it from 1954 and gives it 278 feet of vertical. It closed in 1970 or 1971: it still appears on a 1971 map but not on the 1972 one.1
Skimap.org holds two old trail maps of the hill, dated 1958 and 1961 by the people who shared them, both unsure of the year.2
Sources for this history (2)
- 1Midwest Lost Ski Areas Project · Birch Haven (originally called Suicide Hill)
- 2Skimap.org · Birch Haven
Photos
No photographs of Birch Haven we may republish yet
Its old photos and trail maps live on the sites that collected them, and Google finds the rest.
Memories
What skiers remember of Birch Haven, in their own words.
Facts
Location
43.3553° N · 89.8049° W · Wisconsin
OpenSkiMap lists it as abandoned.
Years operated
from 1954 · the year it closed is not yet collected
Closed for good; the year it closed is not yet collected. It stays here as part of the record of U.S. ski areas.
Its numbers
all 1all 1, in one list
Terrain contours: USGS 3D Elevation Program, public domain