"The Lodge that Went up in Smoke"

Photo by Theresa Zimmerman, courtesy of Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project. The Glacier Ski Lodge at Manitoba in 1946 with the Kenai Mountains to the west of the Seward Highway in the background.

THE LODGE THAT WENT UP IN SMOKE

OCTOBER 2012

Oliver Amend was working in Seward in the spring of 1960 when he heard that his ski lodge on Mount Manitoba was on fire. As soon as he could, he fired up his single-engine airplane and flew over the mountains to check things out.

By the time he arrived, Glacier Ski Lodge was gone.

Photo by Bruce McClellan, courtesy of Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project. The view is from

the top of the ski run on Manitoba in 1942.

Five years earlier, Amend had been given the lodge by its original builder, Gentry Schuster, when Schuster decided he was too busy with his bush-flying business, Safeway Airways, to bother any longer with an alpine skiing venture. “He just turned it over to Oliver Amend to operate—no sale—just a ‘you take it,’” said Schuster’s ex-wife, Virginia, in a 2006 letter published on the Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project website.

Mount Manitoba is located along the Seward Highway near the confluence of Mills and Canyon creeks, about three miles north of Summit Lake Lodge. When Schuster built Glacier Ski Lodge in 1941, no Seward Highway existed, so the road designation was Mile 50 of the Seward-Hope Highway.

By the time Amend took control in 1955, the Schuster marriage was ending, and neither Gentry nor Virginia continued with the lodge in any capacity. Amend, a resident of Seward who had a regular job during the week, ran the place as “strictly a weekend affair,” according to the ALSAP website.



Photo by Virginia Schuster, courtesy of Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project. Army personnel from

Seward are ready to ski on Manitoba in 1942.

Whenever he was gone from the mountain, however, problems occurred. While the lodge was vacated during the weekdays, Amend’s absence left it vulnerable to uninvited and often destructive visitors.

During the week, these vandals—Amend blamed Army soldiers then stationed at Seward—took residence at the lodge without permission. They often burned through the firewood that Amend had stored there for the weekend, and once they apparently began incinerating wooden skis for warmth when they exhausted the supply of stove wood.

According to ALSAP, Amend suspected that in the spring of 1960 the perpetrators were more careless than usual and caught the whole place on fire. Glacier Ski Lodge was never rebuilt, and its special-use permit with the Chugach National Forest was never renewed.

Before disaster struck, however, Amend had put in considerable work to make the lodge an enjoyable recreation destination. The current switchback trail along the base of the mountain’s southern flank was created by Amend with a willing buddy and a D-8 Caterpillar.

Photo by Bruce McClellan, courtesy of Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project . Gentry Schuster works

to build his Glacier Ski Lodge in 1942, referred to at the time by the Schuster family as simply

“the cabin.”

He used tracked military-surplus vehicles called “Weasels” to haul skiers in a sleigh up the mountain, and he often flew to the mountain with ribbon-festooned Jerry jugs full of gasoline and dropped them into the snow so he could retrieve them later with Weasels and fuel up the Model A Ford truck engines that powered his rope-tow system.

He also used dynamite, according to ALSAP, to “shape” the ski slopes up on Manitoba: “Apparently he was doing enough blasting to raise the brow of the local mining community. He remembers one day when a fellow showed up with $30,000 cash. He was hoping Oliver would sell, as there was bound to be something good in the rock to justify all the blasting. It took some time for Oliver to convince the fellow otherwise.”

Photo by Bruce McClellan, courtesy of Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project. A Model A truck

engine was used to power a tram for hauling materials to the construction site in 1942. Later,

it helped power the system of rope tows on the mountain.

From 1955 until the demise of Glacier Ski Lodge, Amend did all the shuttling of skiers and all of the maintenance, while his wife, Cecilia, did all the cooking. Skiers who volunteered to help set up equipment at the beginning of the day and help take it down at the end were able to earn “free days” on the mountain; otherwise, the Amends charged $2 for a ride up the hill and $3 to ski all day.

But the lodge would never have existed if not for Gentry Schuster.

On Oct. 22, 1941, Schuster applied to the U.S. Forest Service to build a ski tow and a “ski hut” above timberline on Mount Manitoba. On Nov. 25, he was granted a permit to build, and he paid a $5.40 first-year fee.

Photo courtesy of Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project. A special-use permit card for

Manitoba ski area in 1942.

By the summer of 1942, he had constructed a rough tram system to haul his building materials to timberline and was busy framing the structure, with physical and financial assistance from his friend, Dick Blissner.

“We had intended the place to be for the use of ourselves and friends, but World War II put about 5,000 troops in the Seward area, and a great many of them were skiers, so we just welcomed all who came up,” said Virginia Schuster.

The lodge had two bedrooms, a dormitory that slept eight, and a loft with open space for numerous guests with sleeping bags. Although no liquor was allowed in the lodge, Virginia said, the G.I.’s sneaked in plenty of booze. “After the war, when Gentry entered the loft, he was annoyed to find thousands of beer ‘empties’ and spent the weekend clearing out the loft,” she said.

Photo by Virginia Schuster, courtesy of Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project.

Lunch is served in the lodge in 1942. Gentry Schuster is seated at far

right. This table reportedly seated 20. The interior was heated with a wood

stove constructed from an old oil drum.

Downstairs, the lodge had a boarded-off area with a large cast-iron woodstove and served as the kitchen. “One Sunday,” Virginia said, “I served a roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy and coleslaw lunch to 67 persons. Since the table seated (up to) 20, that meant setting it four times and washing dishes in melting snow—no sink. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, and thereafter lunch consisted of cold cuts, cheese, canned fruit and cookies.”

Like Amend, Gentry Schuster was a weekend lodge operator. (He was chief operating officer of the Seward dock during the week.) Unlike Amend, he suffered no vandalism, according to Virginia.

But the lodge was not without conflicts. Virginia indicated that Gentry may have had his fingers in too many proverbial pies: “During the war, a pilot wandered into town in a Taylorcraft, and Gentry learned to fly and as soon as he could, bought a small plane and with a private pilot’s license, bought a bush operation,” said Virginia. “Starr Airways of Anchorage went into receivership upon the death of the owner, and Gentry bought their place from the bank, and that become our Anchorage headquarters. He had the Harley-Davidson franchise for Alaska from about 1936, and just as he was in Jack Haven, Penn., to pick up a new plane (Piper) he’d purchased, the Piper Co. had a default by the then-distributor in Alaska, and in disgust they asked Gentry if he’d like the franchise, and of course he said yes.”



Photo by Seth DePasqual, courtesy of Alaska

Lost Ski Areas Project. In 2005, Chugach National

Forest archaeologist Seth DePasqual performed an

archaeological study of the old Glacier Ski Lodge

site on Manitoba. Pictured are a few of the cans

he discovered in the lodge’s dump site.

Gentry was also a lieutenant in the Alaska National Guard during the war years.

Eventually, his other interests took precedence over managing a ski lodge, and he dropped the Manitoba operation into the lap of Oliver Amend.

Remains of the Glacier Ski Lodge can still be viewed in the summer in the hemlocks at timberline. Chugach National Forest archaeologist Seth DePasqual performed an archaeological survey of the lodge site during the summer of 2005, and some photos from the relics he discovered are available on the ALSAP site.

Photo by Tim Kelley, courtesy of Alaska Lost Ski Areas Project.

Pictured in 2011, a section of cable wrapped around a hemlock stump

indicates where the top anchor of the rope tow was.