Snow Valley Vermont Patch, Sealed — c. 1970s

A 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.

Snow 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.

The 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.

An 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.

Snow 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.

What 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.

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