Hahn Mountain

Paul Yerger, a farmer and lumberjack who owned 1,000 acres including part of the Pinnacle, built Big Valley Ski Area in 1968 and opened it for the 1969–70 season. His daughter writes that he built it to keep the state from taking part of his land for game lands, and that he named it after a television show. Big Valley had a Hall double chair and a Hall T-bar, snowmaking, night skiing from its first season and a 500-foot vertical drop.^1,3

After a warm, rainy winter Yerger sold his remaining shares in 1973. His daughter says the corporation then lost the business to its bank; the man who ran the Hahn fire truck company in Hamburg bought it and renamed it Hahn Mountain. Hahn added a rope tow and beginner slope, rebuilt the lodge as a chalet and brought in large Hedco snow machines. A ski instructor who taught there gives 1983 as the closing year; a brochure for 1983–84 survives, and the son of two instructors says it closed for good in the mid-1980s.^1,2,3,4

TodayThe lifts are gone and the lodge is decaying, but lift footings and the attendant shacks at the top of the chair and T-bar remain. (2020)²