Junkyard Parts and Pure Spite: The Cheap Rope Tow That Outlived the Rich Man's Resort

The most important ski lift in American history was built from stolen parts, powered by a repurposed engine, and run by a town that had no business winning anything.

This isn't a metaphor. It's the origin story of one of Vermont's most beloved ski institutions — and it starts with a robber baron's failed dream and a machine assembled from whatever the junkyard had left.

When Skiing Was for Millionaires

In the 1930s, skiing in America was an aristocrat's pastime. Resorts sprang up with grand lodges, European instructors, and — the ultimate status symbol — mechanical lifts. Building a chairlift or even a tow cost a fortune, and the industry's logic was simple: charge rich guests rich prices, and winter becomes a gold mine.

One of the most ambitious of these ventures rose in Vermont, backed by serious money and serious confidence. The plan was to build the finest ski resort in the East, with all the polish and price tags that implied. On paper, it couldn't lose. In reality, it was about to get outcompeted by a hill with no lodge, no glamour, and a lift held together with — this is barely an exaggeration — hope.

Enter the 'Gyp' Slope

Down the road, locals had a different idea about how winter should work. Skiing had caught on with regular people — college kids from Dartmouth and elsewhere were hiking up hills and riding down on wooden skis, and they were exhausted from the climbing part. Somebody needed to solve the problem of getting up the mountain cheaply.

The solution that emerged was gloriously improvised. Locals cobbled together a rope tow using salvaged parts — a motor scrounged from elsewhere, rope, wheels, and hardware sourced through borrowing, bartering, and, according to local legend, the occasional outright theft. The rig was so rough around the edges that folks gave it an affectionate, unflattering nickname: the "gyp" slope. A gyp, of course, meaning a racket, a cheap knockoff — the joke being that this thing was the opposite of the fancy resorts, and proud of it.

And it worked. Riders grabbed the rope and got pulled up the hill for pocket change, over and over, all day. No reservations. No membership fees. Just winter, gravity, and a rope that cost almost nothing to ride.

The Coincidence Machine

Here's where the story turns from charming anecdote into genuine improbability. Every force that should have killed the little hill instead saved it.

The Depression crushed disposable income, which should have killed all skiing — but it devastated the expensive resorts hardest, because nobody had money for luxury. Bad weather and hard economic years that starved the glamorous operations barely dented the gyp slope, whose overhead was essentially rope and grease. The big resort's owners fought for their turf — litigation and legal threats entered the picture, attempts to protect the high-end model from the low-cost upstart — and the legal fight fizzled, leaving the cheap hill standing.

Meanwhile, the tinkering never stopped. The story of the rope tow became, in part, the story of an engineer's obsession — someone who kept rebuilding, improving, and jury-rigging the lift out of parts nobody else wanted. What looked like junkyard fiddling was actually an ongoing experiment in making skiing affordable at scale. The improvisations worked so well that they helped prove a radical idea: you didn't need to be wealthy to be a skier.

The Institution Nobody Planned

The expensive resorts, the ones with the lodges and the prestige? Many folded, their grand visions dissolving in the bad economy. The gyp slope endured, grew a following, and became a genuine piece of American ski heritage — the scrappy ancestor of the idea that skiing belongs to everyone, not just the people who can afford a chalet.

That's the part that makes this story so satisfying. No mastermind planned it. No investor backed it. It was a chain of accidents: a Depression that punished luxury, a lawsuit that went nowhere, an engine nobody needed, and a community too stubborn to admit they were doing anything ambitious.

David beat Goliath, and David didn't even know he was in a fight. He just wanted to get up the hill without climbing it.