{"title":"Vermont","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe Green Mountain state for a reason\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"middlebury-college-snow-bowl-embroidered-patch","title":"Middlebury Snow Bowl Patch, Felt (Worn) — c. 1950s-60s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Middlebury College Snow Bowl patch from Hancock, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1950s or 60s — the same chain-stitched shield, carried further. The felt has gone to a warm tan, the navy has dulled, and the skis crossed behind the bowl have faded most of the way from red to brown.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eCrossed skis were the universal shorthand before logos got professionalized. You saw them on a jacket, on a bumper, on a sign at the end of a dirt road, and you knew immediately what the person or the place was about.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIt worked because skis used to look like that — two long wooden planks, obviously a pair. Try drawing the same symbol with modern shaped skis and it falls apart completely.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWhich makes this one of the few patch designs that is genuinely period-locked. It could not be drawn today and mean the same thing.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eChain-stitched on felt, cut edge, with substantial honest wear. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920039756081,"sku":"RV-VT-085","price":80.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-middlebury-college-snow-bowl-patch.webp?v=1787702861"},{"product_id":"middlebury-college-snow-bowl-embroidered-patch-1","title":"Middlebury Snow Bowl Patch (SB Monogram) — modern","description":"\u003cp\u003eA Middlebury College Snow Bowl patch from Hancock, Vermont, built on white twill with a silver-grey merrowed border — a navy disc carrying an interlocked SB monogram in two blues, a small white summit mark above it, and MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE \/ SNOW BOWL set in blue beneath. This one is modern. It is in the collection because it completes the Snow Bowl run, not because it is old.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe Snow Bowl has been college-owned since the 1930s and has spent every decade since declining to get any bigger. It still runs a handful of lifts on the Gap, still charges students almost nothing, and still shuts when the weather says so.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eA ski area that never expanded is now a rarer thing than a ski area that closed.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe economics of a small college hill are strange and quietly heroic. It does not make money. It was never supposed to. It exists because somebody decided in the 1930s that students should be able to ski, and nobody since has been willing to be the person who ended it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Modern production, likely 1990s or later. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920075374897,"sku":"RV-VT-084","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-middlebury-snow-bowl-patch.webp?v=1787702891"},{"product_id":"vintage-okemo-mountain-skiing-embroidered-patch","title":"Okemo Mtn. Patch (Headdress Logo, Blue Border) — c. 1970s-80s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Okemo Mountain ski patch from Ludlow, Vermont, probably late 1970s or early 80s, featuring the headdress figure in full color over two white snow mounds on a light blue ground. Pointed shield, blue merrowed border, OKEMO MTN. in red across the top. The cleanest of the run.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eListed as a record of what the mountain printed, not as a thing to celebrate. Okemo takes its name from an Abenaki word, and the figure ran on its merchandise into the 1980s before being retired. It is here because removing it from the record does not remove it from the history.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSouthern Vermont skiing in its middle years — after the town had built the hill and before the mountain changed hands and started getting serious about snowmaking, lodging and the drive time from Hartford.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003ePatches from a mountain's middle period are the hardest to date and the easiest to overlook. They are also the ones that show you what a place looked like when it had stopped being small and had not yet decided what it wanted to become.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920104636721,"sku":"RV-VT-083","price":40.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-okemo-mountain-ski-patch.webp?v=1787702908"},{"product_id":"vintage-jay-peak-vermont-aerial-tramway-embroidered-patch","title":"Jay Peak Aerial Tramway Patch (Light Blue) — c. 1970s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Jay Peak ski patch from Vermont, estimated to date from the 1970s, featuring the red tram car again — hanging from its black trolley on a cable that runs off the top-left corner, over a light blue sky. Pointed shield, navy merrowed border, JAY in yellow block with VT. in white beside it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eOne tram, one mountain, one road in from the Northeast Kingdom, and in sixty years Vermont has not built another one. The tram is Jay's single piece of real infrastructure drama, and the mountain has put it on roughly everything it has ever printed.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFair enough. When you have the only one of something in the state, you lead with it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eVermont has not built another tram since, and at this point almost certainly never will. The permitting alone would take longer than the original construction, and nobody is proposing it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920128983345,"sku":"RV-VT-082","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-jay-peak-tramway-patch.webp?v=1787702923"},{"product_id":"vintage-killington-east-ski-resort-embroidered-patch","title":"Killington East Patch (Gondolas) — c. 1970s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Killington East ski patch from Vermont, estimated to date from the 1970s, a rounded octagon with a blue merrowed border — three gondola cabins in brown, orange and red hanging from a cable strung across grey peaks, Killington arched in red script above and East in big orange script below.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThat name has gone out of use, which is precisely what makes the patch worth having. Killington East was the Route 4 side — where the gondola loaded, where most people actually started their day, and where you parked if you knew what you were doing.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eRetired names are the most reliable dating tool in this whole business. A mountain renames a base area or a lift or a side of the hill and every piece of merchandise bearing the old name instantly becomes a fixed point in time. Nobody made these afterward. Nobody could.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe gondola in the picture is gone too, replaced twice over. The cabins in those colors exist now in photographs, in a few people's memories, and here.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eDating patches by retired names is the one reliable method in a field that otherwise runs on guesswork, thread analysis and people being very confident at tables. If the name went out of use in a known year, everything bearing it predates that year. That is as close to documentation as this business gets.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920158114097,"sku":"RV-VT-081","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-killington-east-ski-patch.webp?v=1787702940"},{"product_id":"vintage-jay-peak-vermont-ski-resort-embroidered-patch","title":"Ski Jay Peak Patch (Skier Shield) — c. 1970s-80s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Ski Jay Peak patch from Vermont, probably late 1970s or early 80s, featuring a skier in a blue suit with a red hat and scarf carving across a grey-and-white mountain under a blue sky, red poles trailing. Pointed shield, black merrowed border, SKI JAY PEAK in red across the top and VERMONT in red at the point.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eJay sits at the top of Vermont with almost nothing between it and the weather coming down out of Quebec, which is why it gets more snow than anything else in the East and why it has never once needed to apologize for its snow report. The mountain is four and a half hours from Boston on roads that February does not improve, and that distance is the whole reason the place still feels like the seventies on a Tuesday.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eA black merrowed border is an unusual choice and a good one. Almost every patch in this catalog is edged in the brightest color on its own face — gold, red, yellow — because that is what the mills had on the machines and what sold off a rack. Black stops the picture instead of decorating it, and the snow on this one reads whiter for it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe Northeast Kingdom is the part of Vermont that the rest of Vermont jokes about, and it is also the part with the fewest second homes, the cheapest land and the most people who actually live there year-round. Jay belongs to it rather than to the resort corridor down Route 100, and the skiing has always reflected that.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920198189361,"sku":"RV-VT-080","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-jay-peak-ski-patch.webp?v=1787702964"},{"product_id":"vintage-ski-jay-peak-vermont-embroidered-souvenir-patch","title":"Ski Jay Peak Patch, Sealed (Tram \u0026 Lodge) — c. 1970s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Ski Jay Peak patch from Vermont, estimated to date from the 1970s, still sealed in the original Apatche-Totem bag, header card intact: washable patch, made in U.S.A. by American Craftsmen, 70 W. 40th St., N.Y.C. Through the cellophane: a slanted rhomboid with a red merrowed border, the dark A-frame base lodge sitting under a blue sky, and the red tram car arriving on its cable from the left. SKI Jay Peak in black script, VERMONT tucked into the bottom corner.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFifty-odd years in a plastic bag. Somebody bought this on a trip north, put it away with every intention of getting to it, and then simply did not — for five decades, through house moves, through the jacket wearing out, through whatever else a life contains.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe result is a patch that has never been exposed to daylight. Twill fades, thread fades, and the reds go first; put a worn Jay patch beside this one and the difference is not subtle. This is what the design actually looked like when it left the machine, which is a thing almost no surviving example can show you.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe bag is part of the object now. Opening it would not improve anything.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThere is a practical argument for buying sealed stock that has nothing to do with sentiment. A patch you can see through plastic is a patch nobody has repaired, re-backed, trimmed or steamed, and those things are done more often than the trade admits. The bag is a guarantee.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge, unopened in the original packaging. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920226894129,"sku":"RV-VT-079","price":50.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-jay-peak-ski-patch_eae77b2c-ea2c-4107-a825-36af70aea41f.webp?v=1787702982"},{"product_id":"vintage-jay-peak-ski-resort-embroidered-patch","title":"Jay Peak Shield Patch (Snowflake \u0026 Pine) — c. 1970s-80s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Jay Peak ski patch from Vermont, probably late 1970s or early 80s, featuring JAY in heavy navy block caps over the mountain's mark: a green evergreen with a navy six-point snowflake laid across it, the two shapes sharing the same center. Pointed shield, cream ground, gold merrowed border.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFour letters. The mountain has never felt the need to explain itself to anybody willing to drive that far north, and the drive is most of the point — past St. Johnsbury, past the last town with a traffic light, into country where the farms get further apart and the radio goes to French.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eYou do not end up at Jay Peak by accident. The patch is about as talkative as the place.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eA snowflake laid over an evergreen is the most Vermont mark it is possible to draw, and at least four other mountains in the state arrived at some version of it independently. Jay's is the cleanest of them: the two shapes share a center, so the tree reads as the snowflake's trunk and the snowflake reads as the tree's branches, depending entirely on which one you decided to see first.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920257073457,"sku":"RV-VT-078","price":40.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-jay-ski-patch.webp?v=1787703001"},{"product_id":"vintage-mad-river-glen-embroidered-ski-patch","title":"Mad River Glen Patch (Green, White \u0026 Red) — c. 1970s-80s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Mad River Glen ski patch from Fayston, Vermont, probably late 1970s or early 80s, round on green twill with a green merrowed border, the snowflake and fir in white and MAD RIVER GLEN in red on a band through the center. The same drawing as the die-cut ones, put inside a circle.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eGeneral Stark Mountain, in the Mad River valley, with about two thousand feet of vertical and trails cut in the 1940s by people who were not thinking about grooming equipment because there was not any.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThat is why it skis the way it does. A modern trail is designed around the width of a winch cat and the turning radius of a beginner. These were cut around the terrain — they bend where the rock is, they pinch where the trees won, and they drop away suddenly in places a surveyor would have smoothed out.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSkiing Mad River is an argument with a mountain that was never flattened on your behalf. Most people lose. Some of them come back every weekend for forty years.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eTrails cut by hand in the 1940s follow the fall line, which sounds obvious and is not. A machine-cut trail traverses to keep the grade even. A hand-cut trail goes where water would go, which is why the old ones are more interesting and less forgiving.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920281911601,"sku":"RV-VT-077","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-mad-river-glen-ski-patch.webp?v=1787703018"},{"product_id":"vintage-killington-vermont-ski-resort-embroidered-patch","title":"Killington Gondola Patch — c. 1970s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Killington ski patch, estimated to date from the 1970s, cut as a rounded octagon with a blue merrowed border — three gondola cabins in yellow, orange and red strung on a cable above pale blue peaks, Killington in red script across the top with the K drawn as the mountain's own mark, VERMONT in red at the base.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWhen Killington's gondola opened in 1969 it ran three and a half miles and was the longest in the world. The ride took long enough that people brought sandwiches, read the paper, and got into arguments that outlasted the trip up.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eA lift that long is not transport. It is an event, and for about a decade it was the single most impressive machine in American skiing.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThree and a half miles also meant that if the wind came up and the lift stopped, you were a long way from anywhere with nothing to do but look at the view and reconsider some decisions.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920302915889,"sku":"RV-VT-076","price":40.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-killington-vermont-ski-patch.webp?v=1787703034"},{"product_id":"vintage-mt-mansfield-stowe-vermont-embroidered-souvenir-patch","title":"Mt. Mansfield Stowe Souvenir Patch — c. 1960s-70s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Mt. Mansfield souvenir patch from Stowe, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1960s or 70s, carrying the same full mountain scene — ridge, conifers, trails, the red lift line, the yellow-roofed base buildings — in brighter thread and better condition than most of these survive in. Arched shield, golden-yellow merrowed border.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe souvenir-counter format: a complete little landscape, as much detail as the machine could hold, sold alongside the postcards and the maple candy. This was what you brought home to prove you had been somewhere, back before everybody carried a camera in their pocket and the proof got cheap.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eA patch took effort. You bought it, you carried it home, and then somebody had to sit down with a needle and put it on. Three separate acts of wanting to remember a place.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920320151857,"sku":"RV-VT-075","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-mt-mansfield-stowe-patch.webp?v=1787703051"},{"product_id":"vintage-mad-river-glen-ski-resort-embroidered-patch","title":"Mad River Glen Patch, Felt (Snowflake) — c. 1960s-70s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Mad River Glen ski patch from Fayston, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1960s or 70s, cut to the snowflake outline and worn soft — the green gone chalky, the cream gone warm, the edges furred where the nap has lifted. MAD RIVER GLEN still perfectly legible in red across the middle.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eMad River does not make much snow. Never has. When it does not snow, the mountain is bad, and when it snows the mountain is one of the best in the East, and the people who ski there consider this volatility to be a feature rather than a problem to be engineered away.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSnowboards are not allowed. The membership has voted on that more than once and it has gone the same way every time, which outsiders find baffling and regulars find entirely consistent with everything else about the place.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eNone of this is marketing. It is just a set of choices, made and then held, which is rarer in American business than almost any other thing.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe result is that Mad River has the most honest snow report in the East by a wide margin. There is no number to inflate and no base depth built out of water and electricity. Either it has snowed or it has not, and the mountain will tell you which.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on a felt ground, die-cut to shape, with honest wear. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920333488433,"sku":"RV-VT-074","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-mad-river-glen-patch.webp?v=1787703069"},{"product_id":"vintage-snow-valley-manchester-vermont-skiing-snowman-patch","title":"Snow Valley Snowman Patch, Manchester — c. 1960s-70s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Snow Valley ski patch from Manchester, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1960s or 70s, featuring the same red-hatted snowman holding his skis upright — here moved off felt and onto cream twill, given an arched top and a gold merrowed border. Snow Valley in red script over MANCHESTER, VT. in blue.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eHe turns up on more than one Snow Valley patch, which means somebody there understood what they had. A mountain with a mascot has something the mountain next door does not: a face, and a reason for a child to want the sticker.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eForty years after the lifts stopped, he is doing work nobody intended. He is the reason these patches get picked up off a table instead of passed over, the reason the name Snow Valley means anything at all to people born after it closed, and the reason the mountain has any public memory whatsoever.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eA ski area is a business, a payroll and a snow report. When all of that goes, what is left is whatever somebody once drew to make it look friendly.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThere is a small, odd industry in reproducing these for people who want the nostalgia without the object. Those are easy to spot and worth nothing. This is not one of them — it is the actual article, made for an actual ski area, sold at an actual counter to somebody who was actually there.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920345121073,"sku":"RV-VT-073","price":105.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-snow-valley-ski-patch.webp?v=1787703086"},{"product_id":"vintage-middlebury-skiing-embroidered-patch","title":"Middlebury Skiing Patch (Panther) — c. 1970s-80s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Middlebury Skiing patch from Vermont, probably late 1970s or early 80s, featuring the college panther drawn as a long-limbed cat in a racing tuck — grinning, tail up, poles swept back, going considerably faster than the drawing can hold. Tall oval, light blue ground, red merrowed border, MIDDLEBURY arched in navy over the top and SKIING across the bottom.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eMiddlebury's teams are the Panthers, and at some point in the seventies a person sat down and had to work out what a panther looks like in a tuck. There is no reference for this. Nobody has ever photographed a big cat skiing. The artist simply decided, committed, and sent it to the mill.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eMascot patches survive at a far higher rate than plain ones, and the reason is entirely unsentimental: people cannot throw them away. A shield with a name on it goes in the bin during a house move. A cat in a tuck gets kept, moved three times, and eventually ends up in a box in an attic that somebody's children open forty years later.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThat is how this one got here.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSomebody in the art department presumably asked whether a panther skis with its tail out for balance. The answer they arrived at is visible here and it is, frankly, the only defensible choice.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920356589873,"sku":"RV-VT-072","price":85.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-middlebury-skiing-patch.webp?v=1787703105"},{"product_id":"vintage-smugglers-notch-ski-ways-embroidered-patch","title":"Smugglers’ Notch Ski Ways Patch, Felt — c. 1950s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Smugglers' Notch Ski Ways patch from Jeffersonville, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1950s, featuring a skier in a yellow jacket and red cap carving down a white trail under a blue sky. Pointed shield on felt with a red chain-stitched edge, SMUGGLERS' NOTCH in yellow across the top, Ski Ways in red script through the middle, JEFFERSONVILLE, V.T. along the bottom.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSki Ways is the tell. That phrasing, the chain stitch and the felt ground all point the same direction, and it is the same vocabulary you find on the earliest patches anywhere in New England — the years when a ski area was a cleared slope, a rope, and a hand-painted sign at the road.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSki Ways. That name did not last, and it puts this patch early — back when nobody had settled on what to call the thing they were building. Ski way, ski bowl, ski slope, ski area, ski resort. The vocabulary of the whole sport was still being worked out in real time by people who were mostly making it up.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eUp there the road itself closes every winter. Snow fills the notch, the state stops plowing, and the boulders that give the pass its reputation sit buried until April. For five months of the year the mountain is at the end of a dead end, which has shaped every single thing about the kind of place it became.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eA patch that says Ski Ways is a patch from before any of that was decided.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEverything about the design says uncertainty — the shape, the lettering, the fact that nobody had worked out yet whether a ski area's patch should show the skiing or the mountain or just the name.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eChain-stitched on felt, hand-worked edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920366256433,"sku":"RV-VT-071","price":105.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-smugglers-notch-ski-patch.webp?v=1787703125"},{"product_id":"vintage-ski-dutch-hill-embroidered-patch","title":"Ski Dutch Hill Patch (Round) — c. 1970s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Ski Dutch Hill patch from Heartwellville, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1960s or 70s, featuring a skier in a yellow jacket dropping past a bare blue tree on a pale slope. Round, gold merrowed border, SKI DUTCH HILL stacked in navy block caps with HEARTWELLVILLE VT. beneath. The same artwork as the sealed one, out of the bag and into a life.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe hill closed in 1985. For twenty years after that it was simply woods with an odd shape to them. Then people started going back — not with lifts or permits or a business plan, but with chainsaws and hand saws, cutting the glades back open a few trees at a time so that the terrain could be skied by anybody willing to walk up it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThat is happening at a number of dead New England ski areas now, and it is the only genuinely hopeful thing in the whole lost-mountain story. The lifts are not coming back. But the hill is still a hill, and the snow still falls on it, and there is a small determined population of people who consider that sufficient.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis patch is the paperwork from the first version. Somebody is out there right now making the second one.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThere is no ticket, no patrol and no guarantee of anything. There is also no lift line, which a certain kind of person considers an even trade.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920371532081,"sku":"RV-VT-070","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-ski-dutch-hill-patch.webp?v=1787703144"},{"product_id":"vintage-haystack-embroidered-sew-on-patch","title":"Haystack Patch (Green \u0026 Blue H) — c. 1970s-80s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Haystack ski patch from Wilmington, Vermont, probably late 1970s or early 80s, featuring a single blue block H large enough to fill the entire face, set on kelly green inside a blue merrowed border. HAYSTACK runs in blue caps along a green strip at the bottom. Square with rounded corners, and still in a clear sleeve.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eDeerfield Valley skiing from the stretch when Haystack was a mountain you could simply drive to, park at, and buy a ticket for, like any other hill in southern Vermont.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eA single letter as a logo was a confident move for a mountain that size. It assumes you already know which H it is.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe Deerfield Valley had four ski areas operating within about fifteen miles of each other at one point, which was more than the available population could support and became obvious to everyone involved about twenty years too late.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge, sleeved. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920377463089,"sku":"RV-VT-069","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-haystack-embroidered-patch.webp?v=1787703184"},{"product_id":"vintage-middlebury-college-ski-team-embroidered-patch","title":"Middlebury College Ski Team Patch, Felt — c. 1940s-50s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Middlebury College Ski Team patch from Vermont, estimated to date from the 1940s or 50s, worked on cream felt in pale blue chain stitch — a varsity shield with notched shoulders, MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE stacked across the top, SKI TEAM split either side of a single ski crossed with a pole.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe construction is the date. Chain stitch laid straight onto felt, with the shield simply cut out and no border applied, is how varsity patches were made before merrowed edges and twill grounds took over the trade. That puts this a generation earlier than most of what is in this catalog — in the years when college skiing was the top of the sport in America and the fastest people in the country were racing each other on weekends in front of forty spectators.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe Eastern carnival circuit ran on cold mornings, long drives and start numbers pinned over three layers of wool. You raced alpine and nordic in the same weekend, at mountains four hours apart, and then went back and sat an exam on Monday.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis got sewn onto a team parka and stayed there. That is why so few of them ever come loose.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe schedule was brutal and nobody who did it has ever described it as anything other than the best winter of their life, which tells you something about either the sport or the people it attracts.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eChain-stitched on felt, cut edge, no applied border. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920378675505,"sku":"RV-VT-068","price":135.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-middlebury-ski-patch.webp?v=1787703207"},{"product_id":"vintage-jay-peak-vermont-ski-resort-embroidered-patch-1","title":"Jay Peak Aerial Tramway Patch (Mint Green) — c. 1970s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Jay Peak ski patch from Vermont, estimated to date from the 1970s, cut to a slanted four-sided shape so the top edge runs on the same angle as the cable. A red tram car with white snowflakes on its flank hangs from a black trolley halfway across a mint-green sky, small grey peaks at the lower right, JAY in yellow block and VT. in white script.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe tram went up at Jay Peak in 1966 and it is still the only aerial tramway in Vermont. One cabin, sixty-odd people standing shoulder to shoulder, a long quiet haul up to a summit that is frequently inside a cloud and occasionally above one.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eJay sits close enough to the Quebec border that a good part of the lift line speaks French, the radio stations come from Montreal, and the mountain has always felt less like Vermont than like somewhere that happens to be in Vermont. It also gets more snow than it has any statistical business getting, for reasons meteorologists have tried to explain and skiers have never cared about.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eA tram, a border, and weather nobody can account for. That is the whole mountain on three inches of cloth.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe Northeast Kingdom is the poorest and emptiest corner of Vermont, and the mountain in it gets the best snow in the state.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920379625777,"sku":"RV-VT-067","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-jay-peak-ski-patch_0994adfa-46d5-4a59-8ff9-d491b1eb27c5.webp?v=1787703225"},{"product_id":"vintage-middlebury-college-mountain-club-embroidered-patch","title":"Middlebury Mountain Club Patch, Felt — c. 1940s-50s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Middlebury College Mountain Club patch from Vermont, estimated to date from the 1940s or 50s, a round seal with a crimped, scalloped edge worked almost solid in royal blue on cream felt. MOUNTAIN CLUB arched across the top, MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE around the bottom, and in the middle a stitched landscape: a ridgeline, a stand of firs, water below.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eOuting clubs are the quiet half of ski history. The racers got the write-ups and the trophies; the club got everybody else up the hill on a Saturday in somebody's older brother's car with four pairs of skis sticking out the window.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eMore Americans learned to ski through a club like this than through any resort marketing campaign ever written. Almost none of it was recorded.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThey also ran on an enormous amount of unpaid labor by students who had no idea they were building an institution and simply wanted to get up a mountain on Saturday.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on felt, scalloped cut edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920380576049,"sku":"RV-VT-066","price":120.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-middlebury-mountain-club-patch.webp?v=1787703245"},{"product_id":"vintage-killington-basin-ski-resort-embroidered-patch","title":"Killington Basin Patch (Original Name) — c. 1960s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Killington Basin ski patch from Vermont, estimated to date from the 1960s, a pointed shield with a red merrowed border — S K I letterspaced in gold across a blue sky band, three white peaks with a blue stream running between them, and KILLINGTON BASIN in red across the white below, a small red snowflake under the point.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eKillington Basin. That is what the place was called when Preston Smith opened it in 1958 — before the gondola, before the Beast, before any of the apparatus that would make it the loudest mountain in the East.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSmith was a young man with a lease on a mountain nobody wanted and a conviction that the East could have a ski area on the scale of the West. He was more or less right, and the thing he built eventually swallowed six peaks and ran a season longer than anyone thought possible. But none of that had happened yet when this patch was made.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eA patch that says Basin is a patch from the first act, when the whole thing was still one hill, a road in, and a man who would not take no for an answer.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003ePreston Smith ran the place for more than thirty years afterward and became one of the most argued-about figures in Eastern skiing, which is roughly what happens to anybody who changes an industry.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920381395249,"sku":"RV-VT-065","price":50.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-killington-basin-ski-patch.webp?v=1787703265"},{"product_id":"vintage-dutch-hill-ski-resort-embroidered-patch","title":"Dutch Hill Ski Patch (Blue \u0026 Yellow Skier) — c. 1970s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Dutch Hill ski patch from Heartwellville, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1960s or 70s, featuring the same head-on skier in blue with red pole grips — here on an older, softer ground where the gold ring has gone matte and the white lettering has dulled toward cream. Round, SKI above and DUTCH HILL below.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe drive was Route 8 out of Readsboro, up into the hills toward the Massachusetts line, through country that is still mostly empty. There was a T-bar. There was a hut. There was, by all accounts, a very good beginner slope and a couple of trails steep enough to be interesting.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eNone of that is unusual. What is unusual is how completely it vanished. A ski area is almost entirely made of things that do not last — a lift, a shed, a parking lot, a sign at the turn — and once the maintenance stops, the woods take about fifteen years to make the whole thing ambiguous.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWhat survives is paper and cloth. A trail map in somebody's basement, a lift ticket in a coat pocket, and patches like this one, which are now the most durable object the business ever produced.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe patches travel further than anything else. A lift stays where it was built. A patch goes in a pocket, then a drawer, then a box, then across three states in the back of a moving van.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge, with honest wear. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920382148913,"sku":"RV-VT-064","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-dutch-hill-ski-patch.webp?v=1787703287"},{"product_id":"vintage-mad-river-glen-embroidered-ski-patch-1","title":"Mad River Glen Round Patch, Felt — c. 1960s-70s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Mad River Glen ski patch from Fayston, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1960s or 70s, cut from a round of green felt with no border at all — the edge simply where the felt stops. The snowflake and fir worked in cream, MAD RIVER GLEN in red across the middle.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1995 the skiers bought the mountain. Not a corporation, not a holding company — the people who skied there, organized into a cooperative, several thousand of them holding shares in a ski area that was never going to make any of them a cent.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIt is still the arrangement. Which means the decisions get made by vote, and the votes have come out, over and over, in favor of leaving things alone. Keep the 1948 lift. Keep the natural snow. Keep the trails narrow. A corporate owner would have bulldozed half of it by 1998 and put in a quad.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThere is no other ski area in America that works this way. This patch is from a place that is, structurally, a protest.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIt should not work. A cooperative owning a capital-intensive business with weather risk and an aging lift is, on paper, a terrible idea, and every consultant who has ever looked at it has said so. It has now outlasted most of the professionally managed ski areas that were operating in Vermont when it started.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on felt, cut edge, no applied border. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920382869809,"sku":"RV-VT-063","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-mad-river-glen-ski-patch_2fa2ea3a-f1dc-4052-8521-23d07dae391e.webp?v=1787703309"},{"product_id":"vintage-ski-haystack-embroidered-patch","title":"Ski Haystack Patch (Shield) — c. 1970s-80s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Ski Haystack patch from Wilmington, Vermont, probably late 1970s or early 80s, featuring two black skis standing on end beside a yellow arch — a mountain reduced to one stroke, or a letter, depending on how long you look at it. Pointed shield, silver-grey ground, gold merrowed border, SKI HAYSTACK in black italic across the bottom.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eHaystack opened in the 1960s in the Deerfield Valley as a public mountain — buy a ticket, ride the lift, same as anywhere. It spent its later years as a private club, which is a fate that has befallen a small number of American ski areas and which changes the nature of a place completely.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis patch is from the part where anybody could go. That distinction is worth more than it looks: a public mountain generates souvenirs by the thousand because thousands of people pass through it. A private one does not, because members do not buy souvenirs of their own club.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSo the objects stop. There is a date after which no more of these were made, and everything in circulation now comes from before it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThere is no judgment in this listing about what happened to Haystack afterward. The facts are complicated and contested and not ours to settle. What is not in dispute is that for a long stretch it was a public mountain in the Deerfield Valley and anybody could ski it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920383590705,"sku":"RV-VT-062","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-ski-haystack-patch.webp?v=1787703329"},{"product_id":"vintage-snow-valley-vermont-embroidered-patch","title":"Snow Valley Vermont Patch, Sealed — c. 1970s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Snow Valley ski patch from Winhall, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1970s, still sealed in the original Apatche-Totem bag, header card intact: washable patch, made in U.S.A. by American Craftsmen, 70 W. 40th St., N.Y.C. Through the cellophane: a round navy patch with a lime-green disc set off-center across it, a six-point snowflake laid over the join, and SNOW VALLEY \/ VERMONT ringing the edge — navy letters where they cross the green, green letters where they cross the navy.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSnow Valley was cut among the first wave in southern Vermont, back when the business model was simply: find a hill near a road, clear some trees, install something that pulls people up it. There were no studies. Somebody looked at a slope and decided.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe bag is the whole argument. A patch you can see through plastic is one nobody has trimmed, re-backed, steamed or repaired, and those things are done far more often than the trade likes to admit. Sealed stock from a mountain that closed in 1984 means somebody bought it, put it in a drawer, and then life happened for forty years.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAn enormous number of those bets paid off for twenty or thirty years and then stopped paying. The mountains that survived were the ones that could borrow enough to buy snowmaking in the seventies. The ones that could not became woods again.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSnow Valley closed in 1984 and is now firmly in the second category. This patch is from the stretch when nobody involved knew which way it was going to go.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWhat makes the lost areas worth collecting is not scarcity. It is that each one was somebody's home mountain. Every closed hill in New England has a few hundred people still alive who learned there, who can still describe the layout of the base lodge, and who have nowhere to go and nothing to look at. The patch is the only thing left that is the right shape.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge, unopened in the original packaging. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920384835889,"sku":"RV-VT-061","price":60.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-snow-valley-vermont-patch.webp?v=1787703352"},{"product_id":"vintage-stowe-vermont-ski-resort-embroidered-patch","title":"Stowe Vermont Chairlift Patch (Red Border) — c. 1960s-70s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Stowe ski patch, estimated to date from the 1960s or 70s, featuring two skiers on a double chair — one in black, one in orange — above white snow mounds and small grey trees. Shield-shaped, red merrowed border, blue ground, Stowe and Vermont both in white script. Well used.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe chairlift graphic turns up on more New England patches than any other single image, and the reason is simple: the ride up is the part people actually talk about afterward. The run takes three minutes and you remember none of it. The chair takes eight and you remember exactly who you sat with.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eHalf the people who ever learned anything useful about skiing learned it from a stranger on a lift who had no particular reason to tell them.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge, with honest wear throughout. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920385884465,"sku":"RV-VT-060","price":40.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-stowe-vermont-ski-patch.webp?v=1787703374"},{"product_id":"middlebury-college-snow-bowl-embroidered-patch-2","title":"Middlebury College Snow Bowl Patch, Felt — c. 1950s-60s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Middlebury College Snow Bowl patch from Hancock, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1950s or 60s, worked on cream felt in navy chain stitch. MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE across the top of a notched shield, SNOW running over the rim of a stitched bowl with BOWL sitting inside it, and two red skis crossed behind the whole arrangement.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe Snow Bowl has been running up on the Middlebury Gap since the 1930s, which makes it one of the oldest college-owned ski areas anywhere in the country. It started as a rope tow and a cleared slope and it has never grown into anything much larger than that, on purpose.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eGenerations of students have learned to hate and love the same three trails, in that order, usually within one season.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eStudent ski areas are a nearly extinct category. Insurance, liability and the cost of running lifts took almost all of them out, and the handful that remain are run on institutional stubbornness.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eChain-stitched on felt, cut edge, no applied border. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920388866353,"sku":"RV-VT-059","price":110.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-middlebury-snow-bowl-patch_86071bdb-336b-4e48-8009-db65d0764b43.webp?v=1787703397"},{"product_id":"mad-river-glen-embroidered-collectible-patch","title":"Mad River Glen Patch (Reversed Snowflake) — c. 1970s-80s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Mad River Glen ski patch from Fayston, Vermont, probably late 1970s or early 80s, cut to the snowflake outline and then reversed through the middle: green above with the flake in cream, cream below with the flake in green. MAD RIVER GLEN in red block caps across the join.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe mountain's entire argument fits on a bumper sticker: Ski It If You Can. It has been said with a completely straight face since the fifties, and on a hard morning coming off the single chair into the ice and the bumps it is still, honestly, a fair question.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWhat makes it work is that it is not a boast. Mad River is not the biggest mountain in Vermont or the steepest or the one with the most snow. It is the one that declined to make itself easier, which means the sentence is less a challenge than a warning, issued politely, in advance.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003ePeople put this on their jacket to say something about themselves. They still do.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThere is a specific kind of skier who finds this appealing and a much larger number who find it obnoxious, and Mad River has never shown the slightest interest in converting the second group. The mountain has been telling people not to come for seventy-five years and has somehow never had trouble filling the lift line.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered, die-cut to shape with no applied border. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920390570289,"sku":"RV-VT-058","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-mad-river-glen-ski-patch_7a737436-3be2-4919-9a54-24e8b8640ca2.webp?v=1787703432"},{"product_id":"vintage-carinthia-ski-area-embroidered-patch","title":"Carinthia Ski Area Patch (Lost Mountain) — c. 1970s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Carinthia Ski Area patch from Wilmington, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1970s, featuring a single race gate standing alone in an empty snowfield — one pole, a red panel above a blue one, planted on a white slope under a flat blue sky. Round, black merrowed border, Carinthia in yellow script across the top and SKI AREA arched along the bottom.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eCarinthia, Wilmington, Vermont — its own ski area, with its own management, its own base lodge and its own small loyal following, right up until 1986.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe flags are the interesting part. A small independent mountain putting gates on its patch is a mountain that ran a race program, which means a club, which means kids, coaches, timing equipment and somebody's father standing at the bottom in the cold with a clipboard. All of that machinery existed here and then was absorbed into a larger operation and disappeared as a separate thing.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWhen a mountain gets bought, the trails usually survive. The institution almost never does. This is a patch from an institution.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThat is the real cost of consolidation, and it almost never shows up in the coverage. A bigger company buys a smaller one, keeps the terrain, improves the lifts, and quietly dissolves the club, the race program, the staff who had worked there twenty years and the particular culture that none of it can be reconstituted from afterward.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge, with a loose thread at the border. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920391749937,"sku":"RV-VT-057","price":50.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-carinthia-ski-patch.webp?v=1787703451"},{"product_id":"vintage-okemo-mountain-ski-resort-embroidered-patch","title":"Okemo Mt. Patch (Headdress Logo, Blue) — c. 1960s-70s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Okemo Mountain ski patch from Ludlow, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1960s or 70s, featuring a figure in a feathered headdress bent forward in a tuck, poles trailing, worked in blue on cream. Small pointed shield, blue merrowed border, OKEMO MT. in block caps on a blue band across the top.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eListed as a record of what the mountain printed, not as a thing to celebrate. Okemo takes its name from an Abenaki word, and the figure ran on its merchandise into the 1980s before being retired. It is here because removing it from the record does not remove it from the history.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eLudlow is a mill town with a mountain behind it, and for most of the twentieth century the mill was the main event and the mountain was what people did on Sunday. That ratio has since reversed completely.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eYou can see the modest version of the place in this patch. Three colors, one figure, no ambition beyond being recognizable from across a parking lot.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eA patch like this was never meant to be looked at closely. It was meant to be recognized at forty feet, in bad light, on somebody's back.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920392438065,"sku":"RV-VT-056","price":40.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-okemo-mountain-ski-patch_8a6b931a-3ff6-4067-9610-1ffb6b94387c.webp?v=1787703474"},{"product_id":"vintage-okemo-mountain-skiing-embroidered-patch-1","title":"Okemo Mtn. Patch (Headdress Logo, Red Border) — c. 1970s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Okemo Mountain ski patch from Ludlow, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1970s, featuring the headdress figure in a yellow suit with a red and yellow bonnet, tucked over a snow mound on blue. Pointed shield, red merrowed border, OKEMO MTN. in red across the top.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eListed as a record of what the mountain printed, not as a thing to celebrate. Okemo takes its name from an Abenaki word, and the figure ran on its merchandise into the 1980s before being retired. It is here because removing it from the record does not remove it from the history.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eMid-century resorts reached for this kind of imagery routinely and without thinking about it, and Okemo retired the mark decades ago. It is listed here as a record of what was made, not as a thing to celebrate.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eKeeping the object is how the history stays accurate. Pretending the design never existed is how it gets repeated.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eMountains across the country used similar marks in this period and nearly all of them have since retired them, usually without comment and usually long after they should have.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920393486641,"sku":"RV-VT-055","price":40.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-okemo-mountain-ski-patch_4fca0e75-6b41-4edc-a00e-1f5f23d85999.webp?v=1787703495"},{"product_id":"vintage-killington-ski-resort-embroidered-patch","title":"Killington Patch, Sealed (Red K Logo) — c. 1970s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Killington ski patch, estimated to date from the 1970s, still sealed in the original Apatche-Totem bag, header card intact: washable patch, made in U.S.A. by American Craftsmen, 70 W. 40th St., N.Y.C. Through the cellophane: the same K mark worked in red instead of blue, the skier standing in a blue square cut out of the letter's upper arm, KILLINGTON in red beneath, double red frame, white ground.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSomebody bought this on a good day. That is the only thing we can say for certain, because nobody buys a souvenir on a bad one. They meant it for a parka, and the parka is long gone, and the patch never went anywhere near a needle.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe thing about a sealed patch is that it preserves an intention rather than a memory. A worn patch tells you where somebody went. A sealed one tells you what somebody planned, on a particular afternoon, before the rest of their life carried on happening around it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFifty years of a plan not quite getting done. It kept the colors perfectly.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThere is a whole category of object like this — things bought in a good mood and never used. Concert shirts still folded. Postcards never sent. A patch in a bag is the same artifact, and it is the only one of the three that keeps perfectly.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge, unopened in the original packaging. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920393978161,"sku":"RV-VT-054","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-killington-ski-patch.webp?v=1787703515"},{"product_id":"vintage-dutch-hill-ski-resort-embroidered-patch-1","title":"Dutch Hill Ski Patch (Blue, Yellow \u0026 Red) — c. 1970s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Dutch Hill ski patch from Heartwellville, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1970s, featuring a skier coming straight at you in a blue suit and a white cap, red pole grips flung wide, standing on gold skis between two mounds of snow. Round, medium blue ground inside a gold ring, SKI arched in white across the top and DUTCH HILL around the bottom.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eHeartwellville, Vermont. A T-bar, a warming hut, a rope tow for beginners, and forty winters of southern Vermont families who could not afford Stratton and did not want to drive to Stowe.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThat was the model for a huge number of these places. Not a destination, not a resort — a hill twenty minutes from home with a ticket price a mill worker could justify, where the whole town's children learned on the same slope and the same two people ran the whole operation.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe economics stopped working in the eighties and they stopped working everywhere at once. Dutch Hill closed in 1985. The Forest Service holds the land now, the trails have gone to trees, and the only people up there are the ones who walk in.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eNobody is making more of these.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWhat killed them all at once was snowmaking. The moment a mountain two valleys over could guarantee a season, a hill that depended on weather was finished, and every bank in New England understood that before the owners did.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920394895665,"sku":"RV-VT-053","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-dutch-hill-ski-patch_6e6ca7c0-4500-49bb-84cc-49b92d4aca28.webp?v=1787703542"},{"product_id":"vintage-ski-dutch-hill-heartwellville-vermont-embroidered-patch","title":"Ski Dutch Hill Patch, Sealed — c. 1960s-70s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Ski Dutch Hill patch from Heartwellville, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1960s or 70s, still sealed in the original Apatche-Totem bag, header card intact: washable patch, made in U.S.A. by American Craftsmen, 70 W. 40th St., N.Y.C. Through the cellophane: a round patch with a gold merrowed border, a skier in a yellow jacket dropping past a bare blue tree, and SKI DUTCH HILL over HEARTWELLVILLE VT. in navy block caps.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis is the rarest combination in the entire catalog, and the reason is arithmetic. New-old-stock requires somebody to have bought a thing and never used it. A dead mountain requires the place to have stopped existing. Both at once means the patch had to survive forty years of house moves and clear-outs with nobody ever deciding it was junk — from a ski area that closed in 1985 and that almost nobody now remembers was ever there.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eDutch Hill sat at Heartwellville, off Route 8 in Readsboro, and ran for about forty winters on a T-bar and a warming hut. It is national forest now.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSomebody bought this at the bottom of that hill, with no idea it was among the last printings, and then simply never got to it. The bag has outlasted the lifts, the lodge, the road signs and the business.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eMost of what we handle came off a jacket. This came off a shelf, and the shelf belonged to a business that no longer exists in any form.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge, unopened in the original packaging. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920395452721,"sku":"RV-VT-052","price":55.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-ski-dutch-hill-patch_bd79a836-067b-40c1-8dfd-d54f86a84d1e.webp?v=1787703560"},{"product_id":"vintage-stowe-vermont-spruce-peak-skiing-embroidered-patch","title":"Stowe Spruce Peak Chairlift Patch — c. 1960s-70s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Stowe ski patch, estimated to date from the 1960s or 70s, cut as an arched-top rectangle with a red merrowed border — two skiers on a double chair, one blue and one yellow with an arm raised, above grey firs and a white snowfield. Stowe in yellow script at the top, SPRUCE PEAK in black at the bottom.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFor years, getting from Mansfield over to Spruce meant walking across Route 108 in your boots with your skis on your shoulder, waiting for a gap in the traffic and hoping the driver coming through had seen a skier in the road before.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEvery regular did it a thousand times and nobody ever thought it was strange. Mountains were less engineered then. So were the people on them, and so was everything about how a day out there actually went.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe road is still there, the traffic is faster, and nobody walks it anymore.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920397680945,"sku":"RV-VT-051","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-stowe-ski-patch.webp?v=1787703581"},{"product_id":"vintage-okemo-mountain-ski-resort-embroidered-patch-1","title":"Okemo Mtn. Patch (Headdress Logo, Gold Border) — c. 1970s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Okemo Mountain ski patch from Ludlow, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1970s, featuring the headdress figure in full color — a red suit, a yellow and red war bonnet streaming behind, carving across a white snow mound on a deep blue ground. Pointed shield, gold merrowed border gone soft with wear, OKEMO MTN. in gold across the top.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eListed as a record of what the mountain printed, not as a thing to celebrate. Okemo takes its name from an Abenaki word, and the figure ran on its merchandise into the 1980s before being retired. It is here because removing it from the record does not remove it from the history.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis is Okemo before the base village, before the covered bridges got photographed, before anybody used the word destination in a sentence about Ludlow. A locals' hill in a mill town, where the lift line was made up of people you already knew and would see again at the store.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEvery mountain in Vermont had a decade like this. Most of them have patches from it and very little else.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe size is part of the charm. Somebody costed this out and decided that three inches was plenty for a mountain of that reputation.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge, with wear to the border. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920398401841,"sku":"RV-VT-050","price":40.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-okemo-mountain-ski-patch_5211b379-3157-4cf5-bb68-5ced694d68c0.webp?v=1787703602"},{"product_id":"mt-mansfield-ski-patrol-vintage-embroidered-patch","title":"Mt. Mansfield Ski Patrol Patch (America’s Oldest) — later production","description":"\u003cp\u003eA Mt. Mansfield Ski Patrol patch from Stowe, Vermont, round on white twill inside a blue merrowed border: MT. MANSFIELD arched in blue across the top, SKI PATROL around the bottom, a red cross filling the center with EST. 1934 in white across its arms, and — curved inside the ring in red — AMERICA'S OLDEST SKI PATROL.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe claim stitched into it is true. Charley Lord and a handful of others organized the Mt. Mansfield patrol in 1934, before the National Ski Patrol existed, which makes this the lettering of the oldest continuously operating ski patrol in the country — printed on the patch, in red, with no hedging. The date on it refers to the patrol, not to this particular piece of cloth.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003ePatrol patches were issued, not bought. You got one by passing the tests, and then by going out in the weather that had cleared the mountain of everybody with any sense — bringing a toboggan down Nose Dive with somebody's broken leg in it, in flat light, with the wind coming across the ridge and your own hands long past the point of being useful. When you hung it up after your last season, you were expected to hand the thing back in.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe Mt. Mansfield patrol is one of the oldest in the country. Nearly everything the sport knows about getting hurt people off a mountain, somebody worked out the hard way on terrain like this, usually in failing light, usually improvising with what was in the shed.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThere is no version of this that crossed a counter. Somebody earned it, wore it on the left chest of a wool shirt for a decade, and then did not hand it back.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Crisp, unworn construction: this is a later-production patrol patch, not a 1930s one. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920401056049,"sku":"RV-VT-049","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-mt-mansfield-ski-patrol-patch.webp?v=1787703643"},{"product_id":"vintage-ski-dutch-mountain-embroidered-patch","title":"Ski Dutch Mt. Patch, Sealed — c. 1960s-70s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Ski Dutch Mt. patch from Heartwellville, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1960s or 70s, still sealed in the original Apatche-Totem bag, header card intact: washable patch, made in U.S.A. by American Craftsmen, 70 W. 40th St., N.Y.C. Through the cellophane: a round patch with a gold merrowed border, a skier in a yellow jacket dropping past a bare blue tree, and SKI DUTCH MT. over HEARTWELLVILLE VT. in navy block caps.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSouthern Vermont, and almost certainly Dutch Hill at Heartwellville going by a shorter name — mountains shortened themselves on merchandise all the time, because the mill charged by the stitch and nobody was being precise about it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eDutch Hill sold patches reading both Dutch Mt. and Dutch Hill, from the same maker, with the same artwork, in the same bag. Nobody has ever explained why. Collectors who care about the place want the pair, and the pair is harder to assemble than it sounds.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eDutch Hill ran from the mid-1940s until 1985. Then the lifts came down and the Green Mountain National Forest quietly took the hill back, which is a gentler end than most of them got.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eGo up Route 8 today and you can still find it. The old lift line is the place where the second-growth is a different age than everything around it, and the grade goes strange in a way that no natural hillside does. Volunteers cut glades in there now with hand tools. It is skiing again, after a fashion, without a lift or a ticket or a name.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWalk it in October and the beginner slope is unmistakable. It is the only flat open ground on that whole hillside, and it is slowly filling in from the edges.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge, unopened in the original packaging. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920402137393,"sku":"RV-VT-048","price":55.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-ski-dutch-mountain-patch.webp?v=1787703666"},{"product_id":"vintage-killington-ski-resort-embroidered-patch-1","title":"Killington Patch (Blue K Logo) — c. 1970s-80s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Killington ski patch, probably late 1970s or early 80s, featuring the blue K — a heavy block letter with its upper arm cut away to leave a white square, and a small red skier standing in the gap. White ground, blue merrowed border, KILLINGTON in blue block caps beneath.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis is the corporate era arriving. A single letter, cleanly drawn, reproducible at any size — the work of somebody who had been to design school, which was not true of whoever drew the cartoon skier a few years earlier.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eYou can watch a mountain stop being a place and start being a brand across about four patches. This is the one where it finishes.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe red skier still has a bit of personality in him. Two patches later he would be gone entirely, replaced by a mark that could be reproduced on a lift ticket, a napkin and the side of a groomer.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920406561073,"sku":"RV-VT-047","price":40.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-killington-ski-patch_62ac1beb-aadc-44f5-86b9-caa6845abe2c.webp?v=1787703715"},{"product_id":"vintage-okemo-mountain-ski-resort-embroidered-patch-2","title":"Okemo Mt. Patch (Headdress Logo, Red) — c. 1960s-70s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Okemo Mountain ski patch from Ludlow, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1960s or 70s, carrying the same headdress figure in a tuck — here in red on cream, with a red merrowed border and OKEMO MT. on a red band across the top. The blue and the red were sold alongside each other.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eListed as a record of what the mountain printed, not as a thing to celebrate. Okemo takes its name from an Abenaki word, and the figure ran on its merchandise into the 1980s before being retired. It is here because removing it from the record does not remove it from the history.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eOkemo opened in 1956 on money the town of Ludlow raised itself — local people buying shares in a hill because a hill was the asset the town happened to have, and because the mills were not going to employ everybody forever.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eCommunity-financed ski areas were common then and are extinct now. Whoever drew this was not trying to impress anybody from out of state.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eLudlow's whole economy depended on the mills for another two decades after this, and the hill was insurance against the day it did not. The hill turned out to be right.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920409411889,"sku":"RV-VT-046","price":40.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-okemo-mountain-ski-patch_3150b209-39fa-40f8-bce3-95af1327f564.webp?v=1787703738"},{"product_id":"vintage-mad-river-glen-ski-resort-embroidered-patch-1","title":"Mad River Glen Patch (Snowflake \u0026 Pine) — c. 1970s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Mad River Glen ski patch from Fayston, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1970s, cut to the outline of the snowflake itself — no border, no field, six points and the gaps between them. Green ground, the snowflake arms and a small fir picked out in white, MAD RIVER GLEN in red block caps straight across the middle.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eRoland Palmedo cut Mad River Glen in 1948 having already helped build Stowe, and he did it specifically because he did not like where the sport was heading. He had watched skiing start turning into a business and he wanted one mountain that would stay a mountain — narrow trails, natural snow, no interest whatsoever in being the biggest anything.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThat decision has been held, against the odds and against every commercial logic, for more than seventy-five years. The 1948 chair is still carrying people up General Stark Mountain one at a time. The trails are still cut the way he cut them.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eNearly everybody who tried to do what Palmedo did sold out by 1985. This patch comes from the one that did not.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003ePalmedo had money and could have built anything. What he built was deliberately smaller than what he could afford, which is a decision almost nobody in the history of American recreation has made.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered, die-cut to shape with no applied border. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55920410198321,"sku":"RV-VT-045","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-mad-river-glen-ski-patch_d850e254-9c0d-4b5f-93aa-bc57dfe9df38.webp?v=1787703759"},{"product_id":"vintage-killington-ski-resort-embroidered-patch-2","title":"Killington Elf Patch (Red Border) — c. 1960s-70s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Killington ski patch, estimated to date from the 1960s or 70s, the same cartoon elf on the same red triangle — here with a red merrowed border instead of gold, which makes the whole thing read as one color with a drawing floating in it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eTwo colorways of one character means somebody at Killington liked him enough to put in a second order. That is as close to institutional affection as a 1970s ski area ever got — no memo, no campaign, just a reorder form with a different background color on it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThen he disappeared completely. No farewell, no final season, no mention of him in anything the mountain has published since. A character gets retired the way a sign gets taken down: on a Tuesday, by a guy with a ladder, while nobody is watching.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSold separately from his yellow twin, though the two of them have clearly been through the same drawer. Somebody could reunite them.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eCollectors call this a colorway, which makes it sound more systematic than it was. There was no system. Somebody at the mountain looked at a sheet of background options, said the red one, and that is the entire documented history of this decision. Everything else is inference from the two objects that survive.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56978765185329,"sku":"RV-VT-044","price":65.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-killington-ski-patch_d0e3c59d-7d4d-48b8-8ba5-0022284b0cfb.webp?v=1792339415"},{"product_id":"vintage-killington-ski-resort-embroidered-patch-3","title":"Killington Elf Patch (Gold Border) — c. 1960s-70s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Killington ski patch, estimated to date from the 1960s or 70s, a red triangle with a gold merrowed border carrying a small cartoon elf — white suit, a long yellow stocking cap with a pompom, skis out from under him at an angle no human leg permits. SKI tucked beside his shoulder, Killington in black script across the base.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe elf has no name anybody can produce and no documented origin. He turns up on Killington souvenirs across at least four colorways and then stops, which is roughly what happens to every mascot a mountain commissions, likes for a decade and quietly retires without telling anyone. There is no archive of these. What survives is whatever got sewn onto a jacket.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eMountains used to draw characters. Before the logo era, before brand books and approved color values, a ski area would commission some local artist to draw a guy, and the guy would turn up on everything for four or five years until somebody new took the job and quietly retired him.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eNobody archived these. The character went on patches, on trail maps, on the paper placemats in the cafeteria, and then one season he simply was not there anymore and nobody at the mountain could tell you who drew him or where the artwork went. There is no file. There is no rights holder. There is just this.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eHe is skiing badly, by the way. Weight back, arms up, having the time of his life.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThere is an argument that these character patches are the most purely American objects in the whole collection. No committee, no research, no brand strategy — just a local artist, a deadline and a mountain that needed something to put on a three-inch piece of cloth before the season started.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge, with honest wear. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56978765480241,"sku":"RV-VT-043","price":65.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-killington-ski-patch_03c45282-63b1-4cbb-bed1-d4f2aa8a71bc.webp?v=1792339439"},{"product_id":"vintage-stowe-mountain-ski-resort-embroidered-patch","title":"Stowe Patch (Arch, Flags \u0026 Lodge — Worn) — c. 1970s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Stowe ski patch, estimated to date from the 1970s, the same gothic arch and the same lodge with its three flags, here in a wider cut and carrying its years more openly — the gold merrow worn through along the bottom edge, the blue gone soft.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eRacing was never a side business at Stowe. For a long stretch it was the reason the mountain had a reputation at all — trails cut steep and narrow because that is what racers wanted, and the whole character of Eastern skiing following on from decisions made by people holding a stopwatch in the cold.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEvery mountain in New England that feels harder than it strictly needs to be is, somewhere back in its family tree, descended from that.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge with loss along the lower edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56978765709617,"sku":"RV-VT-042","price":32.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-stowe-ski-patch_a3754a08-ec87-4527-963b-28fad6652856.webp?v=1792339456"},{"product_id":"vintage-okemo-mountain-ski-resort-embroidered-patch-3","title":"Okemo Mountain Patch (Red Blossom) — c. 1970s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Okemo Mountain ski patch from Ludlow, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1970s, round with the field split on the diagonal — medium blue above, cream below — and a red eight-petal blossom opened across the blue. Okemo in soft black lowercase along the cream. Black merrowed border, fraying.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eA flower. On a ski patch. Whoever signed this off was thinking about the other seven months of the year, and in Ludlow that was an entirely reasonable thing to be thinking about — a mill town with a mountain behind it needed the summer trade as much as the winter.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIt is also just a good piece of design, which the ski industry produced more or less by accident and then stopped producing on purpose.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSki areas in Vermont have always had a second life in July that nobody photographs — weddings, conferences, a chairlift running for people in shorts.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge with fraying at the border. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56978767774001,"sku":"RV-VT-041","price":40.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-okemo-ski-patch.webp?v=1792339472"},{"product_id":"vintage-smugglers-notch-ski-resort-embroidered-patch","title":"Smugglers’ Notch Patch (Three Shields) — c. 1970s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Smugglers' Notch ski patch from Jeffersonville, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1970s, featuring the three mountains given three separate heraldic shields — STERLING, MADONNA and MORSE, each a little crest with its own peak and its own color. Round, white ground, blue merrowed border, Smugglers'Notch in black script straight through the middle.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003ePlain enough that the words have to do everything, which at Smugglers' Notch has always been a reasonable bet. It is one of the best names in American skiing and the mountain has never needed to dress it up.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSome patches are designed. This one was simply made, and it is better for it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIt is also a reminder that most patches were not design exercises. Somebody rang a mill, gave them the name, picked a border color off a card and asked how fast they could ship. The good ones and the plain ones came out of exactly the same phone call.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56978769772849,"sku":"RV-VT-040","price":40.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-smugglers-notch-ski-patch_94413966-8f4a-4959-bb8e-4f8970247f18.webp?v=1792339488"},{"product_id":"vintage-skiing-themed-embroidered-collectible-patch","title":"Killington Patch, Sealed (Rainbow) — c. 1970s-80s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Killington ski patch, probably late 1970s or early 80s, still sealed in its original packet, header card reading Pins \u0026amp; Patches, P.O. Box 897, Dillon, Colorado. Through the cellophane: a half-dome with a white merrowed border, a navy skier folded into a tuck, and behind him a rainbow laid down in five bands — blue, green, yellow, orange, red — with Killington in navy across the base.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEvery decision on this patch belongs to one specific decade and not one of them went through a committee. The rainbow is not a logo. It is not a brand asset. It is somebody at a mill in 1979 with six colors of thread loaded and a strong opinion about how to use all of them.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eUnopened, which matters more here than on a plainer design. A banded rainbow is the single hardest thing to date by eye, because every color in it fades at a different rate — the reds go first, then the yellows, and a worn example ends up looking like a sunset through a dirty window. This one has not faded at all.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWhat you are looking at is exactly what came off the machine. Open it and you lose the only copy of that.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThere is a real argument for leaving sealed things sealed. The patch inside is worth what any Killington patch of the era is worth. The unopened bag is worth considerably more than that, and the moment you cut it you have converted the second into the first.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge, unopened in the original packaging. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56978772918577,"sku":"RV-VT-039","price":70.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-killington-ski-patch_daacd28c-7c8d-40a5-8592-259074b9ed2b.webp?v=1792339503"},{"product_id":"vintage-smugglers-notch-security-uniform-patch","title":"Smugglers’ Notch Security Patch — c. 1980s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage security patch from The Village at Smugglers' Notch, Jeffersonville, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1980s, featuring three overlapping peaks in green, white and red on a navy ground, SECURITY arched in gold across the top and THE VILLAGE AT \/ SMUGGLERS' NOTCH \/ VT. stacked in gold beneath. Round, gold merrowed border.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis came off a uniform. It was issued with the jacket, it went back with the jacket, and nobody ever sold one of these at a counter next to the postcards.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSomebody wore this at two in the morning in a parking lot in February, walking a flashlight past rows of frozen cars, checking the lodge doors, finding the one guest who had decided to walk back to their condo the scenic way and was now somewhere in the woods. It is the least glamorous job on a mountain and the whole operation stops working without it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eStaff patches are the hardest thing in this entire catalog to find, and the easiest to be certain about. Nothing that was never sold can have been bought by mistake.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThere is also no secondary market feeding these. Resort patches came off a rack by the thousand and still turn up in bulk lots. Security patches came off perhaps a dozen jackets, once, and then the design changed.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56978775245105,"sku":"RV-VT-038","price":125.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-smugglers-notch-security-patch.webp?v=1792339527"},{"product_id":"vintage-killington-ski-resort-embroidered-patch-4","title":"Killington Shield Patch, Sealed (Gold Border) — c. 1960s-70s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Killington ski patch, estimated to date from the 1960s or 70s, still sealed in the original Apatche-Totem bag, header card intact: washable patch, made in U.S.A. by American Craftsmen, 70 W. 40th St., N.Y.C. Through the cellophane: an arched shield with a gold merrowed border and a white ground, a blue triangle holding a red skier running a white trail, and KILLINGTON in blue across a gold band at the base.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eYellow is a strange color for Killington. This is a mountain that built its entire name on being open when nothing else was — first lifts spinning in October, last ones in June, snow guns running on a bare hill in forty-degree rain because somebody had decided the season was not over.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThat mountain should be stitched in blue and white and ice. It tried yellow once. It did not stick.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe skier in the middle is doing something anatomically questionable with his uphill arm, which was more or less standard for the genre.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge, unopened in the original packaging. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56978777145649,"sku":"RV-VT-037","price":55.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-killington-ski-patch_f925a3ef-a4e9-4a5f-a132-2fbfa70c2e80.webp?v=1792339545"},{"product_id":"smugglers-notch-vermont-mountain-embroidered-patch","title":"Smugglers’ Notch Patch (Named Peaks) — c. 1970s","description":"\u003cp\u003eA vintage Smugglers' Notch ski patch from Jeffersonville, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1970s, featuring a jagged green ridgeline running the width of the face with each summit labeled across it: MORSE at the left, MADONNA in the center, STERLING at the right. Round, white ground, blue merrowed border, Smugglers' Notch, VT. in navy script beneath.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe notch got its name from people moving goods over the mountains into Canada back when doing so was a crime — first under the embargo, later under Prohibition, always in winter, always on foot.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eA modern resort would have built a whole brand on that. Smugglers' has mostly let the name sit there and do its own work, which is a restraint the marketing department of almost nowhere else would have managed.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe border runs are still called what they are called, and the stories are still told on the lift, mostly by people who heard them from somebody else.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eEmbroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ropetow Vintage Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56978779210033,"sku":"RV-VT-036","price":40.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/files\/ropetow-vintage-co-smugglers-notch-mountain-patch.webp?v=1792339568"}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0996\/2048\/7473\/collections\/vermont-collection.png?v=1792351032","url":"https:\/\/ropetowvintage.com\/collections\/vermont.oembed","provider":"Ropetow Vintage","version":"1.0","type":"link"}