Overview
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Imagery: USGS The National Map · Terrain: Mapzen, USGS and others
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Mt. Whitney was the Lake Placid Club's ski area, reached by Club Drive around the north side of Mirror Lake.1,2
Read the whole historyTodayThe former ski hill is deserted and has been taken over by forest.4
Timeline
5 events · swipe
Memories
Skied Mt. Whitney, 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 Mt. Whitney
The closest other lost ski areas, as the crow flies.
- Years not yet collected · 2.9 mi away · New YorkA small in-town beginner hill behind the Lake Placid Center in Lake Placid, served for 37 years by a rope tow and later also by a Poma lift.
- 1948–1960 · 7.1 mi away · New YorkNew York State's first major ski area, on the wind-scoured north side of Whiteface Mountain near Wilmington, which ran from 1948 until 1960.
- Years not yet collected · 10.7 mi away · New YorkPaleface Ski Center, a ski area on Bassett Mountain beside Route 86 in Jay, east of Wilmington, with one double chairlift and a T-bar.
History
Written by aurora.ski from the 4 pages below, each sentence numbered to its sources.
Mt. Whitney was the Lake Placid Club's ski area, reached by Club Drive around the north side of Mirror Lake. Its first T-bar went in in 1946, and a second followed in 1960, though the area's manager later judged it badly placed. Bill Hovey directed the ski school there, and the slopes included a main slope, a half slope and the Hovey trail. A new lodge designed by Tony Allwork was finished in 1962.1,2
The hill served club members until 1976, when it opened to the public. White Book guides of 1977 and 1978 list Mt. Whitney Ski Center with two T-bars, night skiing and 408 feet of vertical, from a 2,000-foot base to a 2,408-foot top; earlier atlases gave 400 feet. No source read gives its last season. The site is now deserted and grown over with forest.2,3,4
TodayThe former ski hill is deserted and has been taken over by forest.4
Sources for this history (4)
- 1Lake Placid Regional Office of Sports and Tourism (lakeplacid.com) · Early Skiing in Lake Placid (Jennifer Tufano, January 8, 2013)
- 2skikabbalah.com · Mount Whitney
- 3skikabbalah.com · MT. WHITNEY References
- 4visitadirondacks.com · Abandoned Places & Ghost Towns
Photos
No photographs of Mt. Whitney 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 Mt. Whitney, in their own words.
Facts
Location
44.3135° N · 73.9507° W · New York · Adirondack Mountains
OpenSkiMap lists it as abandoned.
Years operated
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 4all 4, in one list
Terrain contours: USGS 3D Elevation Program, public domain