Tower Mountain: a free rope tow in town

At the corner of Baldwin and South streets in Greenville there’s a hill with a rope tow, and you don’t pay a cent to use it. Tower Mountain is a ten-acre city park with two slopes — one for sledding and tubing, one for skiing and snowboarding — and a single rope tow that hauls you back to the top so you don’t have to trudge. It’s the only tow-operated hill in Montcalm County, which makes it a small marvel for a town this size.

The catch is the same one every Michigan ski hill lives with: it needs snow. The tow runs once about four inches of packed snow are on the ground, and in a warm winter it might not run at all. That’s the deal you make with a free hill that doesn’t blow its own snow — some Januarys it’s busy from open to dusk, and some it just sits there green, waiting.

When it does run, it runs the old-fashioned way. You grab a moving rope, let it drag you up, let go at the top, and point your sled or your skis back down. No lift tickets, no lodge, no waiver desk. It’s the kind of place where a kid learns to ski on borrowed gear and a parent stands at the bottom in boots that aren’t quite warm enough.

The nearest big resorts sit an hour or more away, and a season pass for a family adds up fast. Tower Mountain is the answer a small town gives instead: pack the snow, string the rope, leave the gate open. On a good cold Saturday, you can hear it from the street — the slap of sleds and the hum of the tow motor, both of them free.