'Ski Movie Night' at Tannery Pond Center
Greg Schaefer amazed a group from the Adirondack Mountain Club when he brought them 200 yards into the woods off the road up to the Gore Mountain Ski Area and showed them the remains of this 1929 Buick, which his father Carl had moved from the Ski Bowl to his new ski school at Skiland in 1936.
Meet Greg Schaefer. I took this photo in early December as he led a group with the Adirondack Mountain Club on a tour of long-abandoned rope tows installed in North Creek in the 1930s. He's seated in the remnants of an old Buick that powered the rope tow at Skiland, where his father Carl established New York's first ski school.
Carl installed this tow came a year after Carl's first, which he installed in 1935 at what we call the Ski Bowl today. That tow was modeled on the first in the nation, which was deployed on Clinton Hill in Woodstock, Vermont that’s easy to find because of this historic marker.
In his history of skiing at Gore, Greg tells the story this way:
“In 1934, my dad, Carl Schaefer, took a trip to Woodstock, Vermont to look at the rope tow that had been installed as a ski lift there. Apparently, he liked what he saw, and carefully observed the construction.”
“ In 1935, Bill Gluesing, my dad’s friend and mentor, gave him $100 and told him to go to North Creek and build a tow in what is now the Ski Bowl. With the aid of his friend Eugene Morehouse from Bakers Mills, a little “engine-uity and a ’29 Buick” (as he said), and some material from the Alexander Brothers garage, he had the first rope tow in New York running by December 20.”
“The tow was extremely successful. He let local youths ski for free but asked them to “back off” on busy weekends. Rides were 10 for 25 cents.”
Other rope tows started sprouting all over North Creek and beyond.
“Two rope tows were put in the Ski Bowl by Emmet Higgins and Bucky Burns,” says River, Rails and Trails, the Johnsburg Historical Society’s concise history of the town.
“A third tow (approximately where the Village Chair is located in the Bowl) was added by 1941,” Greg continues.
“The Barton Tow opened in 1938 near the Garnet Lodge at Barton Mines. From the tow it was a short distance to the trails that radiated down to town from Ives Dam. The Log House Tow was built next to what is now Garnet Hill Lodge in 1938. This was an 800-foot tow powered by a Buick. Skiers could ski the slopes there, or head out on any of the trails toward North Creek or the Siamese Ponds Wilderness.”
A Trove of Old Ski Films
Greg and Ellen at the North Creek Depot Museum, which has a great exhibit on how skiing came to North Creek in the 1930s and has flourished since then.
Here's Greg again with his wife, Ellen, at the North Creek Depot Museum, where they're both board members and Ellen serves as chair. As you can see, the museum has a major exhibit on the early years of skiing in North Creek.
As you can see, Greg is deeply rooted in the subject of our year-long series, How Skiing Came to North Creek. You can hear him tell it firsthand this Friday, January 20, at Ski Movie Night at 7 p.m. at the Tannery Pond Center.
Greg will show footage of the first Snow Train, which brought nearly 400 skiers from Schenectady on March 6, 1934.
We'll also see several films made by Bill Gluesing (pronounced "glee-sing"), a celebrated magician and showman of the time who produced General Electric's "House of Magic" program to demonstrate for the world the wonders of electricity.
A leader in the trail-building effort on Gore Mountain, Gluesing drew a huge crowd with a show he performed at North Creek High School to enlist volunteers to come to the slopes with axes, saws, and pruners. It worked.
"Skiing evolved quickly into taking buses, cars, and trucks up to the Barton Mines on Gore and skiing down the new trails like Pete Gay and Rabbit Run," Greg says. "Bill’s movies like 'Ride Up- Slide Down' were shown as promotions to wide audiences -- even in Grand Central Station to reach New Yorkers."
Among the other films Greg will show is "The Bear," a mini-documentary on a joke that Gluesing and Greg's father enjoyed playing on the "city slickers" who started coming in from Albany and New York City as well as Schenectady.
Here's how he tells the story:
"Bill went out on the Pete Gay trail with my father, Carl, and his big stuffed bear, which stood fiercely on its hind legs with fangs bared. They put the bear on a toboggan behind a large boulder and pushed it out in front of unsuspecting skiers as they came schussing down the trail. Skiers from the city had no idea that a real Adirondack bear in mid-winter would be cozy in its den, not out on the trails preying on skiers. At any rate, they would go careening off the trail to escape this beast that appeared to be chasing them."
"Fortunately, no one was injured," he adds.
"Bill’s Gore Mountain films run a gamut of themes," Greg continues. “'White Magic'” shows a lot of skiing on Gore and beautiful powder on trees and ice encased tree branches. His aim was to show winter’s beauty."
In "The Winter with No Snow," made in 1937, Greg reports, "Bill shows skiers doing their best on just six inches of white stuff. We see people skiing with wings (utter failure), bizarre harnesses for skiing uphill, and a demonstration of uphill side-stepping that only a contortionist could perform."
"In 'Ski Legs,' he tells a humorous story of a love triangle complete with a downhill race." Greg's favorite film, "The Cloud Trail," was filmed by Gluesing in 1939.
"He follows four phenomenal skiers down the harrowing Cloud Trail from Gore's summit to the bottom. It opens with a scene of the sunrise shot from Gore's fire tower, followed by blistering turns in clouds of powder on the way to the base. We see how, in a few short years, skiing on Gore evolved from back-country fun using saplings to steer to certified instructors schussing down mountain trails with a refined, practiced technique in near perfect form."
Your $5 fee admission fee will support the North Creek Depot Museum. We're advised to bring cash. See you there.
