It is common to hear Saranac Lakers call Pisgah a “hidden gem.” It is not a major tourist destination like Whiteface Mountain. Several times recently, village Trustee Tom Catillaz has brought up that Titus Mountain in Malone has more signs in Saranac Lake than Pisgah does. But both parts of that “hidden gem” phrase are accurate to locals. After all, a gem is something small but valuable.

For Mountain Manager Andy Testo, Pisgah is where community happens — from kids skiing and snowboarding after school, honing their skills and jumping off snow ramps they build, to events like the 3-P or the White Stag and innertube races at the Saranac Lake Winter Carnival.

“We HAVE cross-country trails, we NEED down-hill trails,” ski enthusiast Tom Cantwell wrote in a 1953 letter to the editor in the Enterprise, advocating for the village to purchase and run the mountain.

Cantwell saw the mountain making Saranac Lake a resort town. It did not, as the venue was much smaller than other ski areas; but it serves an even more important purpose.

Connor Gillis, left, and Cedar Crist slide to a stop on Mount Pisgah in January 2020, spraying snow toward the camera. Noah Hastings and Mik Denkenberger follow close behind them. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Marbone)

The ski area features six trails on 15 acres with a vertical rise of 329 feet and a tubing hill. It has lights for night skiing, a T-bar lift, snowmaking and a lodge with concessions.

“It has its own aura about it,” Testo said.

It’s a place where kids first put on skis.

Pisgah is an “approachable” mountain on which to get into a sport, Testo said. It is right outside of downtown, it is affordable and it is not intimidating.

All the trails funnel back to the lodge and the lift. It is contained, but with terrain for people to explore.

Mount Pisgah Mountain Manager Andy Testo hops in the cab to tow up a snow gun to the top of the bunny hill on Wednesday. The mountain is heading into its 70th year under village management. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Marbone)

“It’s great for people who are learning, but it’s also a place where a lot of skiers can have a lot of fun,” Testo said.

“A lot of my best memories as a kid were skiing at Pisgah every night after school,” Mary Newman said.

Newman, a ski club instructor, said a ski mom told her she loves that she can drop her kids off and let them ski, giving them independence they do not have elsewhere.

She’s a member of the Friends of Mount Pisgah, a nonprofit group that partners with the village in supporting the mountain through volunteering, fundraising and funding the ski club, which teaches school-aged kids how to shred.

In preparation for the 70th anniversary of the mountain, Newman has been reading about its history through the writings of the late local ski historian and Mount Pisgah booster Natalie Leduc, who chronicled the history of skiing on the East Coast. Newman said she’s always felt Pisgah represents what Saranac Lake is about, but that reading Leduc’s records has emphasized that even more.

As a resident himself, Testo said having village owned recreation areas like Pisgah is a huge draw for him to live here. He grew up in West Glenville west of Albany, in a neighborhood with a small rope tow ski hill around the corner where he learned to ski.

Testo said he’s happy to know a portion of his taxes go to the mountain.

“This is exactly where I want my taxes to go,” Testo said.

He said it shows the community’s values.

The first time he skied Pisgah, he did not see its “grandiosity.” He skinned up and skied down with a friend after the season had ended. It wasn’t until he started working there that he saw throngs of kids zig-zagging their way down the slopes, jumping into the woods to breeze through the trees or hopping on their bikes in the summer to whiz down the trail.

He describes the mountain like a puzzle. He had seen the pieces, but it wasn’t until he saw them all together that he got the picture. That picture is most vivid when the mountain is full, he said. This could be at the Candy Bar races on the weekends or the Mountain Mudfest in the spring. New events like the 3-P, which involves relay teams skiing, pedaling, paddling and running at venues around town, get big groups in what is usually a smaller group sport.

“It’s always been a huge community effort to do it,” Testo said of operating the ski area.

Throughout the years, the Friends group has organized many fundraising efforts through drives, concerts, magicians, raffles and barbecues. He said the community has given back and kept it smooth skiing.

The mountain has four full-time village staff members, 20 to 25 seasonal workers ranging from adults to kids and around 40 people help with snowmaking throughout the winter, Testo said.

The mountain is not just used in the winter, either.

Enterprise records show mountain bikers sought access to slopes of Mount Pisgah starting around 1989. Today, the Barkeater Trail Alliance maintains a series of trails on the mountain through a memorandum of understanding with the village. The kids of many of the people who are on local trails committees founded Saranac Lake Innovative Cycling Kids to organize fundraising and cycling events on the mountain, including the Pisgah Pedalfest.

In the 1940s, a millionaire developed an experimental Cresta Run on Pisgah, a skeleton-style sled track with huge broomed turns. The remnants of this trail became part of The Cure bike trail and the “permanent terrain park” on the “Back Trail.” As the village installs more lights on the main slopes, Testo said more people going into the woods, to carve through the trees with better visibility.

“There’s a lot of hooting and hollering,” Testo said.

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Snowmaking

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On Wednesday, Testo was preparing to pull an all-nighter as he started running the snow guns for the first time this season, fed by a new grant-funded water line. He held a hand up and felt precipitation. It wasn’t that four-letter word “rain,” but it was certainly not snow yet.

“I don’t know what that is but I don’t like it,” he said.

But temperatures dropped that night and white plumes of fluffy snow have been seen enshrouding the mountain top ever since.

Throughout Pisgah’s history, a perennial point of concern has been making sure the slopes are full of snow to ensure a successful season. Snowfalls aren’t what they used to be. This was apparent even back in the 1980s, amid a stream of warm years, inconsistent weather and rough seasons. Former Enterprise reporter Chris Mele described this as “boom or bust” depending on the weather.

When the Friends group organized in 1989, led by Roger King and others, its first and primary goal was installing snowmaking equipment at the mountain.

A fundraising brochure from the Friends group in 1989 lays out the stakes.

“Call it climate change. Call it the greenhouse effect. Call it the whims of Mother Nature. Whatever you call it, the lack of snow during the past decade threatens the continued survival of (Mount Pisgah),” it reads.

There had been tumultuous years of tense village board meetings as the government was wary to spend more taxpayer money on an operation that was losing money.

Half of village-owned ski area’s life was without snowmaking, Testo said. The next half was carried by this technological aid. Now, he’s looking to the future.

“Acknowledge the fact that we’re getting rain events and hot temperatures in January and December,” Testo said. “It’s the same intent as when they put snowmaking in, it’s just continuing to adapt the needs of the mountain in relation to the weather.”

This new water line goes up to the top of the hill and can handle a higher pressure, allowing the new snow guns to produce two-to-four times as much snow.

Testo hasn’t even finished burying the new pipe yet and he’s already thinking about a new water pump. He’s been upgrading the electrical workings and said the electricity is good but water is lacking. A new pump at Frog Pond is his “linchpin” for less time making snow, faster production and faster recovery from warmups.

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History

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Pisgah’s name comes from the Bible and translates from Hebrew to “summit.” Mount Pisgah was the mountain east of Jordan from where Moses looked out at the promised land, a land he would not live to stand on.

According to Leduc, the sport of skiing first came to town in 1892 when a businessman from Ottawa brought his sticks. The skis gained attention and the Branch and Callanan lumber mill started producing them.

As people traveled to Saranac Lake from far and wide to “cure” from tuberculosis at the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium — now the Trudeau Sanatorium — on the shoulder of Mount Pisgah, below the ski area, outdoor recreation in the cold, crisp winter air was a major part of their treatment.

A 1972 Enterprise article says people were skiing Pisgah as far back as 1921, particularly a TB patient named Willard Soper. But it wasn’t until 1938 that ski enthusiasts Tom Cantwell, Joe Perry and John Duquette “discovered” skiing on Pisgah. At the time, the mountain farmland was owned by Harland Branch, who raised potatoes and pigs there. People skied all the way down the hill to Trudeau Road.

Advancements in ski construction, namely the switch from telemark to fixed boot skis, led to a massive increase in popularity of the sport.

Cantwell built a ski tow and from 1946 to 1948 operated a ski area there with Branch and Tom Clement.

In 1948, the village agreed to lease the mountain with an option to buy it. There were years of debate over whether the village should buy the mountain. Mayor Alton Anderson supported the purchase in the Enterprise in 1952.

In 1953, voters approved the purchase of the mountain from Branch for $16,000. This purchase is what the 70th anniversary this year celebrates. In 1953 voters also approved $4,000 in improvements to the lodge and trails. That year, the ski club started cutting trails, installing lights and making improvements all over.

A T-bar lift was installed in 1955 with a new T-bar in 1962 and upgrades in 2011.

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Gold, broken legs and a severed finger

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Mount Pisgah has been part of some wild history over the years.

In 1900, the Enterprise reported that a prospector found fools gold on the mountain. The mine he built on Pisgah made it the filming site for the silent film “Harrigan’s Gold” in 1916, a film which may be lost media.

The writer Sylvia Plath broke her leg while skiing at in 1952 while visiting her boyfriend who was curing from TB in Ray Brook. She tells a fictionalized retelling of this crash in Chapter 8 of her novel “The Bell Jar.”

In 1981, the Enterprise reported that a severed finger was found on the mountain by a high school student, and nobody ever came forward to claim it.

The Saranac Lake Ski Club is one of the oldest in the country, according to Leduc’s research, and played a large role in spawning the United States Eastern Amateur Ski Association, a precursor to the nationwide United States Ski Association which today is governs both amateur and Olympic skiing in America.

The village installed a veterans memorial plaque at the mountain in 1950.

Enterprise records show the village started considering allowing snowboarding on Pisgah in 1991, with some hesitation over what was seen as a “dangerous” sport, as if skiing was not dangerous.

In 1997, the Friends built a new base lodge. Newman remembers her father Wayne working on the lodge. The construction of the Mount Pisgah lodge was one of three grassroots projects mentioned when Saranac Lake was designated as an All-America City in 1998.

Recently, a local pickleball group raised funds for courts at Mount Pisgah.

Mount Pisgah may be a “hidden gem” for most of the world, but for locals, it’s a promised land and a valuable community asset, supported over the decades by taxpayers, volunteers, ski enthusiasts and children. As long as this enthusiasm for a mountain with what he calls an “endearing charm” persists, Testo said the village will keep running it into the future.

But now, as the weather looks like it’s going to get warmer through the weekend, he’s just hoping for cold.

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