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A shot of the old ski trail at Oregon Ridge. Photo provided by Ryan Calo.
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Matthew Graham provides the following note containing evidence of a past ski slope at Oregon Ridge Park:
“There are remnants of a rope tow at Oregon Ridge Park, north of Baltimore. It’s a 140-foot high hill that’s used as a hang gliding training hill. I don’t know when the rope tow died. It’s also a great sledding hill. I think someone was clocked at nearly 50 mph on a snow tube there once. Snowboarders also use it as a good training hill, walking back up after each run. And there are some good trails for XC skiing there.”
Today, the Oregon Ridge Nature Center and Park Council maintains a web site at www.oregonridge.org.
Irvin Naylor, Founder and President of Snow Time, Inc, which owns Ski Roundtop, Liberty, and Whitetail Resorts, contacted DCSki in early 2008 to provide some memories of Oregon Ridge. According to Irvin, Oregon Ridge was started by an insurance executive, Bill Alexander, about the time that Blair Mountain folded, in the mid-1960’s. Irvin writes about an encounter with Alexander:
“Bill Alexander was driven by his chauffeur to Roundtop to meet with Hans Geier and me to see if we would take over the struggling area. I remember the lunch well because Hans and I were each eating hamburgers and Bill Alexander, who suffered terribly from stomach ulcers, said that he would trade us the ski area if he could only eat one of our hamburgers! Oregon Ridge was about 200 vertical feet but strategically located in the southwest quadrant of the intersection of I-83 and Shawan Road, a marvelously convenient location even in the mid-60’s!”
Ryan Calo wrote in with some additional details about Oregon Ridge:
“It was great to see Oregon Ridge listed under Lost Ski Areas! As a local resident, I’d like to give some more information that I’ve heard from several other area residents. Oregon Ridge was a local ski area in the 1960s. Remnants of the tow rope are still visible on the hill. However, no chair lifts were ever present when the ski area was operational. From what I’ve heard, it lasted only a few years and shut down in the late 1960s. The climate was not cold enough to sustain consistent snowmaking. Oregon Ridge is located approximately 13-14 miles due north of downtown Baltimore. The elevation at the top of the old ski hill is approximately 600 feet, which is one of the higher elevations in Baltimore County. The only place with a higher elevation in Baltimore County is farther north on the MD/PA line. Oregon Ridge Park is now run by the Baltimore Co. Dept. of Rec. & Parks, and has a renovated lodge (which used to be the ski lodge), a beach and lake, and is the home of many local events. See this web page for more details.”
Chuck R. provides this anecdote about skiing at Oregon Ridge:
“It wasn’t all that long ago that the rope tow was sporadically operational. I started my first real job after college in Hunt Valley, the nearby business park/community, in 1983. After paying for the post-college move from the flatlands of Missouri, I managed to ‘find’ two hundred dollars of excess moving expense money and, before my new wife could object.. I bought my first pair of skis. While my first skiing experience was at Ski Roundtop, I soon found that, if it snowed hard enough and if they had the park staff available, Oregon Ridge would run the rope tow. Ideal! Five minutes from work and free! I began to go there at lunch whenever I could manage the time. And on those perfect days, when there was enough snow, once in a while the tow would run… and I would be out there at lunch, in my suit, tie and ski coat, trying not to fall and mess my slacks up.
It only lasted a couple of years, then, probably for funding or liability concerns, the park stopped running the rope tow. But, hope never dies, and once in a while, when the snow is heavy on the ground and my kids are out of school, I make the trek to Oregon Ridge to take them sledding, and we all take our skis.. just in case.”
Another DCSki reader, Marvin Hass, seems to remember Oregon Ridge having a chairlift (in addition to the rope tow others have mentioned), although he is not certain.
However, Eric Luebehusen discovered some photos from the Tribute Photo Archives in early 2013 that clearly show a double chairlift at Oregon Ridge.
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A photo of Oregon Ridge. Photo provided by Skip Strovel.
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In November, 2006, K. Norris provided the following twelve pictures to DCSki:
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In April, 2009, Woody Bousquet provided the following two scans - one showing an Oregon Ridge ski patch (still sewn to an old jacket), and the other showing the front and back of an Oregon Ridge lift ticket. “I removed the old tickets from the same jacket,” Woody writes. “They were part of a huge wad of stapled-on tickets from c. 1972.”
In 2026, Woody provided the following scans of a brochure from Oregon Ridge. “The lack of actual photographs and the content of the text suggest that this brochure may be from Oregon Ridge’s first season of operations with its new lodge in 1964,” Woody writes.
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