The warming shack at the top of the old Soldotna downhill ski area. (B. Allen photo, 1966) |
ALL
DOWNHILL FROM HERE
DECEMBER 2009
About 10 years into the history of Soldotna, a transplanted
Norwegian got together with other area residents, such as Kasilof surveyor Stan
McLane, and decided to create a local downhill skiing site.
At a time when oil was being discovered on the Swanson River
field, and Soldotna was about to experience its first growth spurt since the
advent of homesteading in the late 1940s, these individuals opted to carve out
of the woods an alpine recreation area.
The Norwegian, Ralph Soberg, the Alaska Road Commission boss
who had directed the construction of the Sterling Highway, took a Cat and part
of his ARC crew up on what is now known as Ski Hill Road and cleared a 200-foot-high
hillside facing the Sterling Highway as it exits Soldotna south past the Kenai
River bridge.
Looking up the ski hill. |
Whether Soberg, who had been a charter member of the
Anchorage Ski Club in 1937 and was said to be an expert ski jumper, had
permission to clear this Kenai National Moose Range land is the subject of some
speculation.
Several people who lived in the area at the time do not
agree, but some of them think permission was likely because of a favorable
administration there and the different attitudes of the times.
Dave Spencer, an avid skier and the first moose range
manager (1948-1956), had moved on, but he had been succeeded in the position by
his assistant manager, John Hakala—and Spencer could still exercise some
control over the situation because he had become the supervisor for all refuges
in the state.
Regardless of whether the permission obtained or not, the deed
was done.
The hillside had been shorn of trees and brush. Well driller
Jess Shelman had helped install two electrical light poles—one at the top near
a warming hut, and the other about halfway down the slope—and a manager from
the Homer Electric Association had helped to hook them up.
View from the top, looking toward Soldotna. |
A small road had been punched through the forest near the
bottom of the slope to allow for parking. The body had been stripped from an
old Road Commission truck, and the chassis and transmission had been hauled up
the hill to use as a power source for a rope tow.
A heavy rope under tension was pulled up the hill by moving
around the rim of one of the truck’s front wheels; it was guided by other wheel
rims to the bottom of the slope, where it was anchored with a pulley. Later, a
large electric motor was installed in the truck chassis to power the rope tow.
By the winter of 1958, after Pat McElroy had finished his
two-year hitch at Fort Richardson and driven through Soldotna to the commercial
set-net site he had purchased in Kasilof, the ski hill was in business, and
McElroy became a ski instructor.
McElroy, a Class A racer who had skied for the Army alpine
team at Fort Rich and had worked on the ski patrol at Sun Valley, joined McLane
and fellow racers Billy Duncan, George Rydin and Grant Fritz, as instructors
for area kids who came to learn the basics.
“It was a small hill, good for teaching kids how to turn and
run slalom,” said McElroy, now 77.
McElroy and several others provided their ski lessons for
free at the ski hill, which was open for business every weekend and
occasionally on Wednesday evenings. “It was a community service, basically,”
said McElroy. “We even organized some races and took the kids to Homer.”
Homer had its own alpine area near Ohlson Mountain above the
city. The Homer program was more established, successful and long-lasting,
according to McElroy.
Still, he said he liked
the Soldotna Ski Hill from the moment he first saw it.
What remains of the old ARC truck chassis used to anchor the rope tow at the ski hill. |
“There were a lot of people involved in the project
(building and running the facility). It was a community effort. There was no
individual who did everything, by any means, and it was done right.” McElroy
was especially impressed with the rope-tow system. “I’d been around rope tows
all my life—grew up with them in Colorado—and these guys up here did a real
crackerjack job on it. The people that were doing it all had never had any
experience building ski tows, and they just read books and went around and did
it. The same thing happened in Homer. A bunch of old fishermen actually
designed and built those things from looking at other ski tows in other areas.”
Throughout the 1960s, the ski hill remained popular, often
used by dozens of skiers at a time, working their way downslope and then
grasping the rough rope to be pulled back to the top for another brief run. If
the weather was cold, they sometimes congregated in the plywood-sided warming
hut at the top of hill, huddling around a barrel stove in a room used mainly
for the storage of old Army surplus skis.
But times changed, as times usually do. The little kids who
had been so excited to learn on their own little hill became bigger kids who
wanted a bigger hill. And the weather didn’t cooperate, said McElroy.
“We just never got the snow. We had three or four years in a
row where it was just rain. As soon as we’d get a little snow, we’d open up.
And then would come a big rain, and the snow would melt and get all icy and
it’d be impossible to keep it running.
“People just lost interest, and by that time the kids had
all gotten to the point where this little hill—they outgrew it, basically.”
They moved on to the larger and more consistent slopes of Alyeska.
By the mid-1970s, the ski hill had been abandoned. The truck
chassis had begun to slowly rust as trees and shrubs grew up through its hard
steel frame. And the bare hillside had begun to fill again with birch saplings,
clusters of alders, and spikes of spruce.
Now it takes a careful eye to spot the outline of what was.
It takes a patient step to work through the thick, brushy hilltop to find the
old truck frame. And it takes some imagination to picture what—for the winter
denizens of the central peninsula—was a community gathering place, where the
season didn’t seem so cold nor the nights so long.
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