Ski Dutch Hill Patch, Sealed — c. 1960s-70s

A 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.

This 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.

Dutch 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.

Somebody 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.

Most 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.

Embroidered on twill, merrowed edge, unopened in the original packaging. Photos are the condition report.