Up Next: ‘How Skiing Came to North Creek’
Here's what's about to happen at Gore Mountain, Adirondack Explorer tells us:
The Johnsburg Historical Society has joined the First Wilderness Story Collaboration and will help us produce How Skiing Came to North Creek. The Robert & Electa Waddell House is their future home.
"A full-service hiking center, scenic chairlift rides, and a unique rail-zipline ride centered around a new ski bowl base lodge, designed to attract summer and shoulder season visitors."
We can't wait to see that. In the meantime, it's important in our effort to support heritage tourism to tell in compelling and easily accessible ways the whole story of how skiing in North Creek happened. That means going back to the 1800s when logging roads were carved into Gore's great forest. In the early 1930s, those crude, earthen roads became Gore's first ski trails.
We're looking for experts to tell us how:
those first logging roads were cut -- for whom and by whom?
GE scientists Irving Langmuir and Vincent Schaefer led the Mohawk Valley Hiking Club's search for suitable ski mountain;
Bill Gluesing, the star of GE's "House of Magic," excited the crowd at the big "Ride Up, Slide Down" rally at the high school;
packed the first Snow Train from Schenectady on March 4, 1934;
the legendary ski instructor Otto Schneibs became a legend;
huge the effort was to build the "Big Lift" in 1946.
Sterling Goodspeed is our guide. He helped to establish the North Creek Depot Museum and bring the Johnsburg Historical Society back to life. Today he chairs the JHS board. Sterling was there in St. James Church on July 4, 1984 when they celebrated Vince Schaefer's 78th birthday and installed his great work in Adirondack rock above the pulpit.
Sterling is helping us connect with North Creek's best storytellers so we can record, publish, and archive their oral histories. We have in development a book for the Warren County Historical Society, an ArcGIS StoryMap. We’ll call the GPS Tour we build the Gore Mountain Story Cloud.
By this time next year, visitors should be able to listen to our stories as they drive and walk around the Greater Gore Mountain Region. The stories will be automatically triggered by GPS markers. For those who started their writing careers on manual typewriters, this will be an astounding sci-fi moment.
We'll also print a handheld map that pulls all of this together. As you can see, we're covering all the bases.
We're looking for students to help drive this project in the spring semester, summer, and fall semester of next year. If you're interested, click here.
