Mt. Brighton: a ski hill someone had to build first

There’s no real mountain anywhere near Brighton, so the people who wanted to ski here in the late 1950s did the obvious thing: they made one. Crews pushed and piled soil into slopes, and Mt. Brighton opened for the 1961 season — a hill that exists because somebody decided it should. The result tops out around 230 feet of vertical, modest next to anything out West, but plenty for a quick run after work when the lake-effect snow holds.

Today there are about 25 named runs spread over the hill, served by chairlifts and surface tows, with a terrain park that fills up with teenagers on weekends. Almost all the snow is manufactured. The crews draw from an on-site reservoir and blow it onto the runs whenever the temperature drops, which is how a southern-Michigan hill stays open through the warm spells that keep coming.

In December 2012 the place got a much bigger owner: Vail Resorts, the company behind Colorado giants like Vail and Breckenridge, bought it. The next year they spent millions tearing down the old base buildings and putting up a new lodge, a learning area for first-timers, and a stronger snowmaking system. It also folded Mt. Brighton onto the Epic Pass, which is how a 230-foot Michigan hill ended up on the same season ticket as some of the tallest ski mountains in North America.

So the legend you’ll hear — that it was built on top of an old landfill — isn’t true. It’s just dirt, moved on purpose, frozen over each winter into the closest thing to a mountain that the flat farmland between Detroit and Lansing was ever going to get.