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Perry
Merrill, VT State Forester,
left, and Harold Haynes, Jay
Peak Inc. president,
directing clearing of the
'Open Slope' in July of 1956.
Behind them is one of
Richard Pope's cutting crew
from Eden, VT |
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Photo courtesy Richardson
/ Newport Daily Express |
That winter (1956-57) Walter
sold lift tickets and hot dogs alongside Newport's Don McNally, Jay's first
mountain manager, and alone taught gargantuan classes with upwards of 50 student
skiers. He groomed trails with a large, almost homicidal, hand-towed roller-device.
As winter turned to spring, Walter was a dynamo, climbing the mountain more
than a hundred times to lay out trails and lifts: the 2-mile-long 'Montreal
Trail', the expert 'Giant Slalom Trail' (soon after renamed the 'Haynes'), and
the extension of the 'Poma' to the top the east peak were completed before the
1957-58 ski season started. And Walter was a dreamer - as Andy Pepin of Newport
(lawyer and secretary-treasurer of the young Jay Peak, Inc.) recalls, "We
often had to hold him down to earth, and burst some of the balloons of his flights
of fancy" (with a prick of reality, or the young corporation might have
over-inflated).
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Jay
Peak's first mountain manager
Don McNally fishing
for Northern Vermont's legendary
fur-bearing trout |
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Photo courtesy Richardson Studio,
Newport, VT |
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