Snow Valley Manchester Patch, Felt (Skier) — c. 1950s-60s

A vintage Snow Valley ski patch from Manchester, Vermont, estimated to date from the 1950s or early 60s, featuring a skier in blue and red running across two red-outlined peaks with small blue trees scattered behind him. Round cream felt, a navy ring chain-stitched near the edge, SNOW VALLEY arched in red over the top and MANCHESTER, VT. around the bottom.

Four decades of operation, and then nothing at all. Snow Valley sat off Route 11 between Manchester and Londonderry, it taught a very large number of people from Connecticut and New York how to ski, and in 1984 it stopped.

The land is still there. The cut of the trails is still legible from the air if you know what you are looking at, and there are lift footings in the trees for anybody willing to go and find them. That is the entire physical remainder of a business that ran for forty winters and employed half a town.

A ski area leaves almost nothing behind. No ruins worth the name, no plaque, no marker at the road. It leaves a clearing that slowly stops being a clearing, and it leaves patches.

There is a particular feeling standing in an old lift line that is now just a clearing. The pitch is still right. The trees are the wrong age. Everything about the shape of the land tells you people used to come here in numbers, and nothing else does.

Chain-stitched on felt, hand-worked edge. Photos are the condition report.