The start of every ski season is great, and this one is made better by the fact that it will be the 60th birthday for Fayston’s Mount Ellen, founded as Glen Ellen in December 1963 by Walt Elliot.
Sugarbush, which purchased Glen Ellen in 1979 and renamed it Mount Ellen, has a whole series of events planned this season to celebrate the 60thbirthday of Mount Ellen including free Glen Ellen pompom hats on opening day, December 22, and a January 27 Cowbell Champagne Party in the Green Mountain Lounge a throwback to 1963 when Elliott invited guests behind the bar to test their cork-shooting prowess.
If they hit the cowbell in the rafters, drinks were on the house. This tradition resurfaced at Mount Ellen’s 50th birthday celebration and it’s back again.
According to published reports, Elliott had spent time in South Africa, and earned an engineering degree from Cornell. While Elliot had a career in New York City, where he met his wife Cynthia Greenfield, he was focused on skiing, in particular the Stamford Ski Club where he was president. During that time, he was involved in building a ski lodge at Killington.
Not long after, the couple found a home in Warren where the town was not much different than it is today, a store, library, post office and inn. Elliot rented a house next to the post office and his wife recalled that the floors of the house went downhill.
“The ski area that Elliott conceived in the early 1960s would be, above all, a family mountain. Purchased from a private landowner with funds raised by Elliott and a small group of investors, Glen Ellen opened for business in December 1963, with 28 trails, three chairlifts, and a T bar,” per a Sugarbush blog post from 2013.
“Greenfield remembers that individual shares of the mountain were sold for $1,500 and included 20 years of free skiing; family shares sold for $4,500. Bud Lynch, who hailed from Stratton Mountain, designed the original trails. Area loggers cleared the land and sold off the wood. Greenfield oversaw food and beverage sales and, as she says, “watched the money.” Neil and Zip Robinson moved up from Bromley to run the ski school,” the post continues.
In the early years, those who worked for Elliot recall him being very hands-on and someone who would not ask someone to do something he wouldn’t or couldn’t do himself.
What is now one of Sugarbush’s hallmark rites of spring, Pond Skimming, had its root at Mount Ellen/Glen Ellen. Per published reports Pond Skimming, was held in the early days of Glen Ellen, and rumor has it that, along with the 6-foot-3 Walt Elliott skimming (and coming up short), one of the ski patrollers participated in the event in the nude. Races were held between the ski patrol and the ski school each year, as well as slalom races pitting local restaurant waiters and waitresses against one another.
NASTAR
Elliott was reported to have a keen interest in ski racing and Glen Ellen was one of the first eastern resorts to adopt National Standard Race (NASTAR) ski racing. In 1970, Glen Ellen hosted the USSA National Championships, planning to stage the downhill event on F.I.S., the slalom on Cliffs, and the giant slalom on Inverness. The first two events went flawlessly but then the Inverness lift suffered a mechanical problem before the giant slalom race. Mad River Glen stepped in to host the event.
His interest in ski racing and the racing culture dovetailed nicely with the Green Mountain Valley School (GMVS) students who first trained at Mad River Glen but soon moved to Glen Ellen.
From the blog post: “Al Hobart, one of GMVS’s founders, recalls a deal over snowmaking: “Glen Ellen was looking for money. I gave them a loan to put in snowmaking on the top of Inverness so we could use the trail.” (Elliott was an early pioneer of snowmaking, installing his first guns on the number 4 lift, now the Sunny Double, in the late 1960s.)
In 1982, GMVS helped fund the installation of a Poma lift specifically for student training on Inverness. And as recently as 2011, GMVS and Sugarbush co-funded the purchase of 40 energy-efficient Snow Logic guns for additional snowmaking on Inverness.”
Elliott sold the mountain to Jenna Van Loon of Fayston in 1973. He died in a plane crash in 1978.. Van Loon’s ownership ended with a bank intervention. That led to former Canadian Olympic team member and Stratton Mountain manager Harvey Clifford purchasing the resort from the bank until Roy Cohen purchased it in 1979. Cohen purchased Sugarbush in 1978. After the sale of Glen Ellen to Cohen, the name was changed to Sugarbush North and later to Mount Ellen.
Beyond the January 27 celebration, Sugarbush is offering brunch and Bloody Mary Sundays at Mount Ellen, a St. Patrick’s Day party on March 17 and a closing day party on March 31.
