Blue Marsh

The hill near Bernville began in the late 1960s as Mount Heidelberg, tied to the Heidelberg Country Club across the road. One researcher found its first season listed as 1968 and its summit T-bar dated 1969. In the Heidelberg years the T-bar, a rope tow and a beginner area served the slopes, and the lodge sat partway down the hill.^1,3

In 1986 new operators led by Joseph Aicholz leased the area and renamed it Blue Marsh. They added a triple chair at the top in 1987 along with many snow tubing slopes, and they allowed snowboarding early on. At its end Blue Marsh had seven lifts and tows, among them a triple, a double, a T-bar and four handle tows, with 315 feet of vertical, about a dozen trails and night skiing every night but Sunday. It was already struggling by 1995.^1,2

The owners shut the area down in 2005 and auctioned its snowcats, T-bars, tubes and lights on October 29 of that year. Nearly every building and lift was later demolished, and plans to build homes on the land have not come about.^1,2

TodayThe open slopes are growing back in; chairlift foundations and the T-bar's top building are about all that is left. (2020)^1,2