Beaver Mountain preparing for 75th year of operation

In its 75th year Beaver Mountain Ski Resort is approaching one of its earliest opening days ever.

The season’s first day is scheduled for Wednesday, Dec. 10.

“We are pretty excited about this anniversary,” said Owner Marge Seeholzer. “As far as we can research we’re the last original family-owned ski resort in the United States.”

It was Marge’s late husband Ted’s parents, Harold and Luella Seeholzer, who founded the resort.

“This opening is earlier than normal but it’s always a great time, we love opening this early,” Seeholzer. “The past few years we’ve just barely been able to open just before Christmas.

“The winters have seemed to shift a little bit, they’ve come a little later. But as you recall, recently we had very early storms and very, very cold weather for a week or so. We were blessed with really good storms.”

So how is the snow just a few days before Wednesday’s opening?

“The snow is good. I’ve been up a few times recently to get my office ready to go. We’ve actually been able to have snow groomers on the ski runs for over a week now. That is huge.

“We had wet storms, which is good for the opening because then you can pack that snow down it gives you a good base for future use. Now we’ve changed seasons again and now we’re in a warm period without any precipitation which helps save what we have and hopefully we’ll get new storms quickly.”

Seeholzer said not all the runs will open Wednesday.

“Sometimes at an early opening like this we like to save a few runs just for a couple of days so that when we get our weekend crowd, which is a lot larger than the weekdays, then we will have some fresh runs to open up.

“We are ready with everything, all the lifts have been inspected and there has been a lot of maintenance leading up to the new season.”

She said in the off season a lot of mowing was done on the ski runs with a unit called an Aeibi.

“It is a giant mower that climbs the mountain and cuts down all the brush. It’s cut close to the ground so we can actually get on the snow and it allows you to ski with a lot less snow.”

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