Lost ski areaNorth CarolinaBlue Ridge MountainsSoutheast
Hound Ears
Two small ski slopes at the Hound Ears Club near Boone, opened by the Robbins brothers in 1964 alongside a golf course.
Overview
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Imagery: USGS The National Map · Terrain: Mapzen, USGS and others
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The brothers Grover, Harry and Spencer Robbins built Hound Ears Club on the site of Shulls Mill, a former mill town in southwestern Watauga County, as a Bavarian-style resort with both a golf course and a ski slope. It opened as Hound Ears Golf and Ski Club in January 1964 with two small ski slopes, a little over two years after the state's first commercial ski area, Cataloochee, began in December 1961.1,2,3
Read the whole historyTodayHound Ears continues as a private four-season club.4
Timeline
1 event · swipe
Memories
Skied Hound Ears, 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 Hound Ears
The closest other lost ski areas, as the crow flies.
- Years not yet collected · 2.6 mi away · North CarolinaA small chairlift ski area off Highway 105 between Boone and Linville, remembered from the late 1960s to about 1990, whose slopes are now community trails.
- Closed 1985 · 68.5 mi away · VirginiaVirginia's southernmost ski area, a small chairlift hill at Fancy Gap beside the Blue Ridge Parkway, run from the mid-1970s until 1985.
- Opened 1972 · 85.9 mi away · KentuckyA small ski area on Big Black Mountain near Lynch in eastern Kentucky that, by one account, opened in 1972 and closed around 1982.
History
Written by aurora.ski from the 4 pages below, each sentence numbered to its sources.
The brothers Grover, Harry and Spencer Robbins built Hound Ears Club on the site of Shulls Mill, a former mill town in southwestern Watauga County, as a Bavarian-style resort with both a golf course and a ski slope. It opened as Hound Ears Golf and Ski Club in January 1964 with two small ski slopes, a little over two years after the state's first commercial ski area, Cataloochee, began in December 1961.1,2,3
DCSki places the slopes off Highway 105 between Boone and Linville and describes a double chairlift and a rope tow for a children's slope, on terrain suited mostly to beginners. No source found gives the year the skiing ended.4
TodayHound Ears continues as a private four-season club.4
Sources for this history (4)
- 1NCpedia (State Library of North Carolina) · Skiing (John Hairr, 2006)
- 2Hound Ears Club · About
- 3High Country Press · Hound Ears Club Celebrates 50 Years in 2014 (March 24, 2014)
- 4DCSki · Hound Ears
Photos
No photographs of Hound Ears 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 Hound Ears, in their own words.
Facts
Location
36.1733° N · 81.7381° W · North Carolina · Blue Ridge Mountains
OpenSkiMap lists it as abandoned.
Years operated
from 1964 · 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