Up Close | The Unique Single-Person Chairlift at Mad River Glen

By Lisa Gosselin Lynn

As New England ski areas rush to install four-, six-, and even eight-person chairlifts, Mad River Glen remains a believer in the power of one. The Fayston, Vermont, ski area is home to the Single Chair, the last of its kind in the lower 48 states, and to slide onto its cushioned wood-slat seat, pull the safety bar closed, and rumble in solitude over snow-covered glades is to make a pilgrimage to another era.

In 1946, Mad River Glen founder Roland Palmedo commissioned the American Steel & Wire Company to build the original Single Chair. Designed to take skiers 2,000 vertical feet up Stark Mountain in 12 minutes, it’s said to have been the fastest chairlift in the world when Mad River Glen opened on December 11, 1948.

In Mad River Glen, Palmedo was looking to create what he described as “not just a place of business, a mountain amusement park, as it were. Instead, it is a winter community whose members, both skiers and area personnel, are dedicated to the enjoyment of the sport.”

That spirit carried on through decades of expansion. It was only amplified in 1995 when owner Betsy Pratt, a New Yorker who had inherited the resort from her husband two decades earlier, turned Mad River Glen into the country’s first skier-owned co-op.

By the early 2000s, the co-op knew the Single Chair needed to be either fixed or replaced. The cost to refurbish it was $1.8 million; installing a new double chairlift was $300,000 less. But more than 80 percent of the 1,700 shareholders voted to restore the Single Chair, aiming to preserve Mad River Glen’s character while staving off overcrowding on its trails.

Working with the Preservation Trust of Vermont and the Stark Mountain Foundation, shareholders raised the full $1.8 million, and the ribbon was cut on the refurbished Single Chair on December 15, 2007. Five years later, Mad River Glen earned the honor of being the only ski area on the National Historic Register, thanks in part to its iconic ride. 

“I don’t think we ever would have raised that kind of money to preserve any other chairlift,” says Eric Friedman, Mad River’s marketing director at the time. “That chair galvanized our community and made us realize what we had in the ski area.”