Skiing Turns Through the Timber: Cutting a Trail Toward Multi-Use, Ecological Forestry

This paper examines the role of downhill skiing in the development of American forestry practices. By focusing on the state of New Hampshire, where foresters carved some of America's first ski slopes in the 1930s, this paper shows how forest management practices were mutually constitutive with this new form of recreation. A closer look at the papers of Henry Ives Baldwin and other New Hampshire foresters who endeavored to integrate forestry practices with ski trail development challenges the notion that skiing simply brought about an environmental "downhill slide". Rather, it shows that the skiing foresters were particularly sensitive to mountain ecology and anticipated the development of "multi-use" forestry well before federal forest recreation policies were codified in 1960. In the process, they made important contributions to the emerging science of winter.