The town ski hill Gladstone built itself

It started with three men skiing out to a farm on a winter night in 1937. Hilding Granberg, Helmer Skoglund, and Art Skoglund made the trip out to the Wickman place and back, liked it enough to do it every Thursday all winter, and out of those evenings grew the Gladstone Ski Club. The next year a city club bought the Wickman farm outright — 78 acres of steep hills and valleys cut through by the Days River — with the plain idea that the town should have its own winter sports park.

They built it the way small towns built things then: with their own backs, plus help from the U.S. Forest Service and WPA crews during the Depression. The first rope tow went up on the front hill and was dedicated in January, with a second one in “the bowl” running by the end of that month. By January 1939, 400 skiers were turning out on a good weekend, and the winter carnival that year reportedly pulled 2,500 people to the hill — in a town that didn’t have many more residents than that.

What’s remarkable is that it never closed. Plenty of small Michigan ski hills from that era are gone, mapped now only by people who track lost ski areas. Gladstone’s is still here and still municipal, run by the city rather than a resort company. There are beginner and intermediate runs, a T-bar and a handful of rope tows, several tubing lanes with their own lift, snowmaking, a terrain park, even a half-pipe, all of it lit for night skiing. Nearly ninety winters on, kids are still sliding down the same Wickman-farm hills three guys skied out to for fun.