Trapp Family Ski Touring Center Patch, Stowe — c. 1970s

A vintage Trapp Family Ski Touring Center patch from Stowe, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1970s, round with a pale blue merrowed border and a cream outer ring carrying Trapp Family and Ski Touring Center in black blackletter, arched top and bottom. In the middle, a pale blue disc with a red crown above Stowe in small black letters.

Johannes von Trapp opened the Trapp Family Ski Touring Center in 1968, and it was the first commercial cross-country ski center in the United States. Not one of the first. The first. Every touring center in America that came afterward — the trail fee, the rental skis, the warming hut with soup on — is working from a template that got written on this hillside, and almost none of them know it.

There is a specific kind of person who skis cross-country. They are not looking for a lift line, a base village or a sports bar. They want to go out into the woods on narrow skis in the cold and the quiet and come back three hours later having spoken to nobody at all, and feel better than anybody who spent the day on a chairlift.

For sixty years, that is where that person has gone. The crown belongs to the family. The rest of it belongs to everybody now.

Embroidered on twill, merrowed edge, faded. Photos are the condition report.