Re: Black Mountain In The Future 320 Rar
Wan Cabiness
Considering the short time that Black Mountain College existed, there have been an unusual number of books written about the college. Only one contains personal reminiscences of people who actually attended the college and the writings included in it are very brief. I have read most of the other books and they seem to describe a different college from the one I attended. I was there for three years starting in late 1944 and can see that the books are scholarly, but depict such a different institution because the college was always in transition. Many of the faculty and students were there for a very short time, especially in the summers, when some were present for only a few weeks. Without disparaging these books, I can tell you about my experience there.
I first heard about Black Mountain during the one year I attended Washington University in St. Louis, where I was deeply discouraged by what I saw as a hidebound approach to higher education. As a candidate for a BFA degree, I would be studying drawing for two years consisting of charcoal renderings of plaster casts of classical sculpture. The rest of the offering included no language except English, Art history was the only history offering and there would be no real science. It seemed to me that I would graduate as a trained hand and eye, knowing little about the world in a larger sense.
During Christmas break some young people who had gone to Black Mountain before graduation from high school (not required at BMC) came back with a fantastic report: there were no grades and thus no accreditation; there was no required syllabus; a person could take as many or as few courses as desired, with no prerequisite background; classes were small and most of the work running the college was done by student volunteers with great camaraderie. This sketch was just a start, but I was completely turned on by curiosity and a need to break out. With only this glimpse of the college I applied for admittance and was accepted. I found out later that the admissions committee was composed of only two students and two faculty.
The Appalachian mountains of Western North Carolina are astoundingly beautiful. The soil is rocky and glaciated, so most of the area is uncleared hardwood forest, with farm fields only in the bottoms. The streams and rivers are clear and cold. The vegetation consists of everything that grows from as far South as Florida and as far North as Vermont. There are usually no clusters of similar trees, but instead a very mixed forest of great beauty. In autumn there is a gradual drying out rather than a cooling that brings on a cathedral of color in the tall forest. The mountains are extremely old and eroded to graceful soft female ridges and valleys. The college owned over a thousand acres of forest including a ridge 1500 in height, a small lake at the bottom and thirty acres or so of farmland.
Anything was possible at BMC. A friend, Harry Holl, wanted to set up a blacksmith shop and without spending any money found or made the necessary equipment and built a shelter for it. Arthur Penn, a student, produced several marvelous theatrical performances with people with no acting experience. John Cage and Merce Cunningham got people doing modern dance. Buckminster Fuller made his first geodesic dome there, which collapsed. A print shop was rescued from abandonment and added to my awareness of the graphic arts. A group of students designed and alone built a new faculty residence. Many people of prominence visited the school, perhaps just to see for themselves what they had been hearing about.
Apparently, this was what John was waiting for and he finally suggested that next class we could discuss what had happened at this first meeting. In the end, we tried to understand how groups work, how leaders emerge, how they may be displaced, how rules of behavior develop and what happens when they are broken. It turned out to be a fascinating study. This was the kind and variety of the learning experience at BMC.
A peculiar aspect of the college was our isolation from the North Carolina mountain community and culture surrounding us. That we were liberal was the least of it: the fact that we had black students raised many an eyebrow locally; the fact that women at the school were working in Levis loading coal was alarming. The local community puzzled about what the college was up to. On the other hand, the college had little understanding of the Southern mountain mind.
The experience of Black Mountain College was catalytic for me. My growing up and becoming more aware of the wider world was accelerated. I came from the calm sleep of Jewish suburbia in the border state of Missouri to a wider view of my life choices. Most importantly, the time at BMC fostered in me the confidence that I was adaptable, resourceful and could continue my education on my own.
Driving the reversal is a commitment, from a group led by Indy Pass and Entabeni Systems owner Erik Mogensen, to help Fichera find a new owner for Black Mountain and gather resources for a bridge season.
Leading the search for a new owner will be Andy Shepard, a New England ski luminary who has orchestrated the survival or resurrection of the Saddleback, Big Rock, Quoggy Joe, and Black Mountain of Maine ski areas.
Young Mogensen, like the Mogensen of today, was obsessed with skiing. Each fall, he would negotiate gear upgrades with his parents, angling to combine his November birthday present with his Christmas present. He always rode ski swap skis. Skiing, he said, took up a huge portion of the family budget for his father and mother, a now-retired autoworker and nurse, respectively. The Mogensens hunted deals: $89 ski-and-stay packages at Okemo, Vermont; Skican packages that compelled the family to drive an hour and a half to Toronto, then park and fly to interior BC.
Mogensen was 16 when Dr. Lore abruptly shuttered the mountain, which he later sold to the private Buffalo Ski Club next door (the modern Buffalo Ski Center also contains the remnants of a third ski area, Sitzmarker).
But in a string of brutal winters, punctuated by rained-out Christmases, the abrupt Covid shutdown of 2020, the advent of dirt-cheap local Epic Passes, a public feud with the Ski The Whites uphill organization, and relentless pricing pressures on all parts of the business, Indy Pass had been a constant positive for Black Mountain.
A per-visit payout accompanies those good vibes. When Indy mailed Fichera his first check, following the (otherwise disastrous for everyone), 2019-20 ski season, the operator called Fish to report that the payout was too large. Fish laughed and told him to go deposit the check. That Indy check has grown each year, Fichera said, and was approximately 20 times larger this past ski season than for that first one.
Somewhere, Mogensen knew, the 2023 White Mountains version of his 16-year-old self sat helplessly mourning the loss of their wintertime home. When Tamarack had shuttered nearly 20 years before, teenage Mogensen had written a letter to the Buffalo News:
In the meantime, Mogensen needs to find a new owner. New England is thick with talented ski area managers, with ski enthusiasts, with money. But identifying the person or group of people with the right combination of these traits is a bit like sniffing out truffles. You need the right dog.
It nearly all collapsed in 2014, when the Libra Foundation, miffed, Shepard says, by a dispute with one of the mountains, suddenly pulled funding and demanded that all three be sold off for parts and never re-open as ski areas. He had to save the ski areas all over again. In a scramble of fundraising and bureaucratic re-ordering, he turned each one over to groups of locals, who continue to operate all three today.
In many ways, the snap resurrection of Black Mountain is an almost clichd New England story of beloved business closure igniting community shock followed by mass action and (hopefully) salvation. In other ways, however, the speed and scale of the response signals the rise of a new power dynamic in American lift-served skiing, one that grants small ski areas access to the capital, technology, and connections that they have previously lacked.
Neither Mogensen nor Fichera view Black Mountain as possessing an inalienable right to exist. But both believe, after a week of cross-country phone calls, that they can find a sustainable model. That small, independent ski areas, with the right support, can co-exist with giants.
And if Indy Pass and Entabeni can, with the help of an on-the-ground task force, save Black Mountain, then they may, in the process, draw a blueprint that distressed ski areas in Montana or Michigan or New Mexico could follow. The combined companies could, in other words, act not just as promotional and technology partners, but as strategic advisers as well, guiding ski areas in its orbit to sustainable 21st century existence.
But the consumer habits that big, inexpensive passes have stoked will be tough to break, Mogensen says. For Black Mountain and other independents to succeed, a critical mass of skiers needs to reconsider how they approach their ski days and ski seasons.
The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 88/100 in 2023, and number 474 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email ski...@substack.com.
Black Mountain, New Hampshire will remain open for the 2023-24 ski season, ski area owner John Fichera has confirmed to The Storm Skiing Journal, reversing a decision announced last week on the mountain\u2019s Facebook page.
\u201CWe're not going to open so that John and Jane Fichera can be here for five more years,\u201D Fichera told The Storm. \u201CWe're opening as a transitional year to find a new buyer, a new operator, a new steward for the ski area. And if it's possible, we'll have the season to work on it and then finalize the deal sometime next year in the offseason. If it's not possible, then the writing's on the wall.\u201D
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