On a snowy day in 1980, Chip Chase literally skied his way into a new life. He and a friend, Winslow Ayer, at the time two back-to-the-lander free spirits in their late twenties, were on a backcountry ski trip in the Allegheny Mountains of Tucker County, West Virginia, in search of a cabin on Cabin Mountain. Not having much luck (spoiler alert: there is no cabin on Cabin Mountain) and a little bit lost, they skied down the slope of the county’s highest peak, Weiss Knob, and came to a dead stop in front of an abandoned ski lodge.
“I said, I know exactly what this is—an old downhill ski area,” Chase, who’s now sixty-nine, tells me from his front porch near the base of that same mountain. “We saw the old towline, and there were even poles with pulleys and whatnot.” As they made their way back up the mountain, they took in a panoramic view of Canaan Valley, a unique ecosystem of forests, rivers, and wetlands in the highest mountain valley east of the Rockies, just south of the former timber and coal
