Lost Ski Mountains

For fifteen years the peak has sat fallow, abandoned to time as trees and bushes grow, driving by always evokes a sigh in me, long ago this hill was where I learned to ski. But the industry is not what it once was, snowmaking and insurance drove up the cost, this place where families once spent the day, now sits shuttered, slowly rotting away. The old lodge has lost half its windows, its siding faded by the sun's harsh glow, there’s a giant hole up on top of the roof, and graffiti sprayed by some drunken youth. Lifts still stand, but all the chairs are down, stacked in rows, rusting on the ground, the cables now vanished into the trees, paint is peeling, the lift shacks all moldy. Laying nearby, twisted and half-stacked, as if subjected to medieval torture racks, sit piles of broken, old snowmaking pipe, now simply scrap, glinting in noon-day light. Saddest of all is the half-visible ski trails, now covered in saplings, young, health, and hale, where once me and my sibling fiercely raced, where more than once I fell flat on my face… The white swath of beauty clad in snow, that once adorned this peak’s long slopes, now grows in like pasture gone to seed, it's become a place where mosquitoes breed. It may seem bizarre, to some out there, mourning for the cold and frozen air, but this place once meant so much to us, now given over to saplings and rust… …sigh…