Mount Trashmore: the Riverview hill where people skied on the dump

For a stretch of winters, the best sledding and skiing in this flat corner of Downriver was on top of the garbage. Riverview opened its city landfill in 1968, and as the trash piled up year after year, the city did something only a few towns ever tried: it shaped the growing mound into a ski hill. Locals named it exactly what it was — Mount Trashmore.

Riverview Highlands had real runs, with chairlifts and tow ropes and almost 200 feet of vertical drop, all rising out of dead-flat Wayne County where there’s nothing else like a hill for miles. The catch was the hill itself. Buried garbage rots, and rotting garbage gives off heat. The warmth seeping up through the slope made it a constant battle to keep snow from melting, and the ski operation never really paid for itself. The runs were shut down in the 1990s.

The mountain didn’t go away, though — it just changed jobs. All that buried trash keeps making methane, a flammable gas, and instead of letting it leak into the sky the city started capturing it. Pipes laid through the old fill pull up to a couple thousand cubic feet of gas a minute and feed a plant that turns it into compressed natural gas. The city even runs vehicles on fuel made from its own dump. Riverview was one of the first towns in the country to convert landfill gas into vehicle fuel this way.

Today the slope is a golf practice spot, and the wells and pipes do their quiet work underground. Stand at the base on a summer afternoon and it’s just a big green rise. But it’s the only “mountain” most Downriver kids ever skied — a hill made entirely of the things their parents threw out.