John Wuerthner writes about a ghost or unfinished ski hill near Harmon, West Virginia:
“Back in the mid-80s I tried to go to work for the company that was developing this resort. If memory serves me, it was the same guy who built Snowshoe. They ran out of money and what you see here is the start of the ‘on mountain work.’ I hiked up to what would have been the base of the mountain [25 years ago] and what you have is a wonderful north facing ridge that is over 1,000 feet of vertical drop to a base that is at 3,000 feet above sea level. During the ’80s I would make the 2-hour drive from DC and walk up to the base. The road was closed with the usual ‘No Trespassing’ sign in place, and I would just marvel at this natural east-west ridge, much like what Vail is built on, but smaller, with plenty of snow from November on through the season because of its great elevation.
At the real estate sales office in Harmon, they had large scale model of what the resort would look like. At the time, my family had built a retreat at Wintergreen and I grew up skiing on the famous New England hills, so I had some idea of what I was looking at. If I had 20-50 million dollars, who knows!”
John provides the following image from Google Earth:
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Readers report that this “ghost” hill is Tory Mountain, an ambitious effort that got off the ground but was never quite finished.
In June, 2010, reader Rob sent the following two images.
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A 1983 “Ski West Virginia” booklet describes Tory Mountain. Image provided by Rob.
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A newspaper clipping included in a brochure sent out by Tory Mountain. Image provided by Rob.
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Interestingly enough if you zoom out and rotate 180 degrees and zoom in again it does appear to be north facing. I think Google maps is messed up.
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