History
The Mount Bachelor Ski Area was founded by Bill Healy (1925–1993) on December 19, 1958, with $75,000 and a one year lease from the U.S. Forest Service for the land. The four other major stockholders were Felix Marcoulier (1917–2004), Dr. Bradford Pease (1912–2004), Oscar Murray (c. 1917-present), and Phil Gould. The founders raised $100,000 from local investors and made many important management decisions that would shape the path of Mount Bachelor and Central Oregon for decades to come.
The ski area opened as Bachelor Butte in October 1958 with a rope tow and a 3,100 feet (940 m) platter lift rising 1,000 ft (305 m) and a lift ticket was three dollars. The geographical name changed to Mount Bachelor in 1983 after the Bend Chamber of Commerce persuaded state and federal officials to adopt the more descriptive term "mountain." Well-known broadcaster and avid skier Lowell Thomas visited the young ski area in 1961, flying over from Sun Valley with J. R. Simplot. The first area of the mountain developed for skiing was the northeastern side. The northwestern side was not lift-served in 1973, but those who ventured for the "Outback Trail Tour" paid a dollar in advance and got a return ride by a sno-cat to the lodge. A new trail was finished in 1975, and the Outback double chairlift was installed in the summer of 1976 at a cost of $700,000. It was replaced by the $3 million high-speed quad (Outback Express) in the summer of 1987; with a capacity of 2,800 per hour. The lengthy Northwest Express chairlift was added in the summer of 1996, a high-speed quad with 2,365-foot (721 m) vertical. This lift further expanded the terrain to the west and increased the resort's overall vertical, lowering the minimum lift-served elevation to 5,700 feet (1,737 m).
The first summit chairlift was installed in the summer of 1983, a high-speed detachable triple. At the time, it was just the second detachable chairlift installed in the world. It was upgraded to a quad in 1997. Original plans for a summit lodge and an accompanying service road were abandoned in 1982 to attain approval from the forest service.
Due to its challenging terrain parks and excellent snow conditions, Mount Bachelor is the official home training resort of many professional and Winter Olympic athletes, and hosts several professional USSA competitions each year.
Read more about this topic: Mount Bachelor Ski Area
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)