Another volunteer ski slope

The Boston Globe is reporting today on a ski slope in Londonderry, Vt., where citizens are doing something similar to what's happened in Tupper Lake over the last two years.

At Magic Mountain (maybe the name helped a bit?), they've raised nearly $1 million to renovate the mountain there by selling shares to renovate a mountain that was closed for most of the 1990s. Once a certain number of shares are sold, ownership will transfer to a partnership that includes share owners and Magic president Jim Sullivan.

It's similar to what happened at Hickory Ski Center in Warrensburg, which is now owned by about 300 shareholders.

It's interesting, because it seems to come out of the same spirit that helped ARISE reopen Big Tupper on a volunteer basis. Yet they are looking to make that model sustainable, while ARISE says that it's impossible to keep that going here for much longer. Granted Big Tupper's model was designed to be temporary while the ACR awaits permitting, with volunteer labor and many temporary patches to the infrastructure there, but I wonder if it could have been successful if it was designed in a more sustainable way.

Previous Post | Next Post