Hathaway's

Thanks to Thomas Liba who got information on this area from Warren Brown and Larry McCallister, we now know of this area that operated in Medway. Here's what he found out:

Located on the shore of the East Branch of the Penobscot River in Medway, Maine and likely built by Frances Bologne (sic) in the '50s. There was one rope tow running 400' up slope with one main trail and a ski jump. Total vertical drop was about 100'. There had been a warmingowj hut and lights at one time. It sounds like the area may have closed briefly in the '60s, but was operating until at least '73. The area is now a snowmobile club. The trail, tow path, and jump are still evident although somewhat brushed in. The buildings associated with the hill are gone.

To the right is the TerraServer USGS topo of the area. The hill is on the far right of the image, on the west side of the river, facing north east, by Ledge Falls ("Falls doesn't appear on the image attached). The slope is still denoted in white.

"venturer" has more information: I have some more information about the Hathaway’s in Medway, Maine. It was actually run by the recreation department of neighboring East Millinocket as a free community “ski tow”. It closed at the end of the 1980 season due to the spiraling costs for liability insurance. After the ski tow closed, the East Millinocket Recreation Department had bus trips down to Mt Jefferson in Lee for the kids.

The ski tow, as it was called, had a 400 ft rope tow powered by a 3 speed electric motor to take you up the 180 ft vertical drop. The attendants who were older high school kids, were only supposed to run the rope on low speed. They used to like to crank it up to high speed once you were on it. Talk about fun! When you reached the top of the hill you almost shot over the other side! I don’t know how many leather gloves that rope wore holes into! The ski tow was open weekends and a couple nights during the week, as the main slope was lighted. I remember going night skiing with my friends was much more fun than staying home doing homework. For most of its life, the ski tow had 3 trails – the main slope, a 20 ft wide trail called Woodsman, and a trail down a poleline right of way. Woodsman used to be real fun at night as it wasn’t lighted. Occasional grooming involved borrowing the snowmobile club’s doubletrack snowmobile and drag, as most of the time the trails were not groomed. When I was 14 years old around 1979 I cut more trails using just a bucksaw. In 1980, a boy scout explorer post adopted the ski tow as a project and widened my narrow trails and did a lot of brushing. We were only able to enjoy these new trails for 2 years as the ski tow then shut down. It was a great community ski area as we were kids and didn’t know about the bigger mountains. All we knew was that skiing was wicked fun and we didn’t want to be doing anything else.