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This week, one of our favourite Wayback fall photos. The new season officially arrived last week and with it a reminder of just how beautiful our landscape is. In this vintage postcard, people are enjoying the fall colours from the chairlift at Hidden Valley Highlands Ski Area. Do you know their vantage point? Can you guess the approximate year this photo was taken?
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Last week we shared this photo with you:
This undated photo provides a glimpse of days gone by on Main Street.
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Where along Foxpoint Road was the ski hill located? I would like to explore it. Thanks!
Definitely Hidden Valley. Probably late 60’s.
They had a tower at the top and operated the lift, (Dutchmen Hill) pretty much all summer so people could ride up and view the area.
They also had the area’s first miniature golf course and of course, the chalet was the scene for music and dancing as well in those days. Heck they even had “go go girls” in metal cages hanging over the side of the dance floor but I never found out the names of any of these girls… any of them remember this???
Now it sits empty and quiet except for the winter ski season. In the 60’s and into the 70’s however, Hidden Valley was “the place to go”.
We also had a good ski hill just south of Huntsville and this one had a ski jump too!
There was a smaller one, great for learning at Tally Ho winter Park, another at Cedar Grove Resort and there were hills in Bracebridge and a good one at Sundridge.
I think the actual first ski hill in the area was at Limberlost Lodge, located where the Limberlost Forest Reserve is now. They actually ran special trains from Toronto for skiiers to go to this hill and stay at Limberlost.
One, very much forgotten ski hill, was located at Foxwood Resort at the end of Fox Point Road. There is still a little bit of the lift shack there and the trees are all the same vintage on what used to be the ski slope. It was pretty tiny and I’ll bet you can count the number of people who remember it’s existence on the fingers on one hand but it was there.
It seems that as time has passed, we have refined the equipment, improved the safety and performance but we have lost a lot of the original, interesting and smaller places to time. The costs have risen a lot too and sometimes I wonder which scenario was best… old, cheap, abundent and unprofessional or new, state of the art with higher performance but at a much greater cost and only a few sites available.
Looks like Hidden Valley ski hill chair lift which operated for a while in the fair weather in the 1960’s. I’ll go with 1966.