Stratton Patch (Bear Head) — c. 1980s

A vintage Stratton ski patch, estimated to date from the 1980s, cut as a rounded triangle with a grey merrowed border — stratton in deep maroon blackletter across the bottom, and above it a small grey-outlined diamond holding the black bear's head in profile.

This is the bear reduced to the absolute minimum. Stratton spent twenty years putting the whole animal on things: standing upright, paw over the frame, unmistakably a bear. By the eighties it had been cropped to a head in a box, the way a logo gets handled once a marketing department arrives and decides the mark should work at the size of a lift-ticket wicket.

Something is lost in that trade and something is gained. The full bear had personality. The head in the diamond has authority. You can see the same thing happen to half the mountains in New England across the same decade — the drawings get tighter, the colors get fewer, the charm goes out and the professionalism comes in.

Stratton meanwhile was becoming the most important mountain in American snowboarding. The US Open ran here year after year while other resorts were still printing the word FORBIDDEN on their lift tickets. A grey-bordered corporate triangle is a strange artifact of the exact years when the place was doing the least corporate thing in the sport.

The blackletter is the giveaway for the era, by the way. Stratton leaned Austrian from the beginning — the Tyrolean eagle, the Hotel Tyrol, the Gothic lettering — and held onto the typeface long after it had dropped the rest of the costume.

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