Lost Valley Ski Area Patch, Auburn — c. 1970s

A vintage Lost Valley ski patch from Auburn, Maine, estimated to date from the 1970s, a tall oval with a light blue merrowed border — the state of Maine outlined faintly in grey, the same cartoon skier in his orange striped sweater standing on it under a small yellow sun, and LOST VALLEY set so that the skier's own skis form the V. AUBURN MAINE beneath.

The skis making the V is the kind of idea that takes a designer about four seconds to have and forty years to stop being pleased with. It works. Nobody who sees it once fails to see it every time afterward.

Lost Valley opened in Auburn in 1961 as a small hill with lights — the format that has taught more Americans to ski than every destination resort in the country put together, and gets about one percent of the attention.

It is still running, which puts it in a minority of the places in this catalog.

Night skiing deserves more credit than it gets. A lighted hill forty minutes from a city, open until nine, is how a person with a job and children actually learns to ski. The destination resorts get the photographs; the small lighted hills got the students.

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