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Robert Ash ('57)
Ski Pioneer: Bob Ash looks with pride on Winterplace
This article appeared in the Register-Herald on Dec. 27, 2003.
By AUDREY SCHWITZERLETTE
When Robert Ash was 3 years old, he knew he wanted to ski.
His father's work with the Navy had taken the family to Cambridge, Mass. That's where the young boy - now in his 60s - saw a short film featuring a man skiing down an Austrian mountain.
Three years later and back home on Westwood Drive in Beckley, little Bob helped himself to some wood, a saw, a sheet of sand paper and a jar of Johnson's paste wax, and whittled his own pair.
"They didn't work well," Ash recalled. "Dad felt sorry for me, so we went to Beckley Hardware and ordered a pair of skis."
The skis couldn't arrive soon enough. But when they did, they changed his life and, eventually, life for all in southern West Virginia.
It was $100 Ash borrowed years later that led to the creation of Winterplace Ski Resort.
If it has to do with skiing, Ash knows about it.
He's designed several ski resorts around the country, invented snow-making guns used throughout North America and the globe, painted ski resorts to scale, drawn trail maps, managed ski mountains, built and installed ski lifts, produced and appeared in award-winning ski films, taught skiing and - most importantly, he says - made many people happy.
These days, from his home at Ghent, Ash can't help but get emotional when he sees carloads of people drive into Winterplace.
"When I see them get out of their cars and see them just looking so happy to be there, so happy to ski ... it's a good feeling," he said.
And these days, as he swooshes down the mountain - what he calls "drawing on it" - he loves the sport perhaps even more than he did as a child skiing down Old Mill Road using broomsticks for ski poles.
For years, Ash had no one to teach him, not even a book on the sport - that was, until the Andersons moved in down the road.
Jim Anderson, now a well- known Beckley attorney, and his sister, Jane, spent time in Europe while their father served the U.S. military as a dentist. The Andersons skied in places like Austria and Germany. When they returned to Beckley, they had a few things to share with Ash, who never missed an opportunity to strap on his skis and sail down the biggest vertical drops in his neighborhood.
Snow skiing was constantly on his mind.
After graduating from Woodrow Wilson High School in 1957, Ash spent a year in military school at Lewisburg. On Sundays, he had special privileges that allowed him to ski after church. On the way to a track meet at West Virginia University, Ash's track team stopped for a picnic at Slaty Fork. Though Snowshoe was years away, Ash thought the mountain he saw there looked like a great place for skiing.
In the next decade, he would offer his input on the designs of both Canaan Valley and Snowshoe resorts.
Ash's love for snow skiing, combined with his creative mind, gave him all sorts of ideas to contribute to the sport as it gained popularity. Throughout his 20s, he traveled the country, installing ski lifts and learning more about skiing and what it took to design and run ski resorts.
By the time he was nearly 30, he was more than ready to see a successful resort closer to home. Bald Knob near Flat Top had attempted to be southern West Virginia's only ski resort, but its success was short-lived.
Ash knew someone could do better, and all it would take to prove it was a $100 investment.
"And I had to borrow the money for that," Ash said. "Without that $100, this community would be in sad shape. ... That resort does so much for the economy and so much to make people happy, and that's really what it's all about."
For years, Beckley's pioneer skier had been skiing the mountain known as Huff's Knob at Ghent. Property owners had given Ash permission over the years to ski on their mountains. Now, Ash wanted to buy an option on the property.
In 1972, with $100, Ash purchased an option on 275 acres of Flat Top Mountain property for the purpose of bringing snow skiing to southern West Virginia. Friends Jerry and Sam Laufer of Princeton joined Ash to form Sugar Camp Developers.
Eventually, Sugar Camp deeded the property over to Winterplace's first owners in exchange for $670,000. More than 10 years after Ash borrowed the $100, Winterplace was born. Ash master-planned the resort for the new owners.
"I'm proud of Winterplace," he said. "I'm not proud because I did it, but I'm proud because it's there for people to enjoy."
When Ash borrowed money to purchase the option for Winterplace, he also convinced the lender to give him another $100. With that, he financed a trip to Sugar Mountain, N.C., a brand new ski area.
"I walked in off the street and told them I wanted to run their resort," he said.
His experience with chair lifts - and a business philosophy centered on "happy workers make happy customers" - landed Ash a job as mountain manager at Sugar Creek. Later, and after holding a variety of positions, Ash moved on to nearby Beech Mountain, where he became the resort's CEO. He even used his artistic ability to paint a rendering of the mountain, to scale.
It was during his tenure at Beech that Ash obtained his first patent on a snow-making process - the idea for which he had conceived years earlier. Today he has six patents in the United States and Canada and plans to obtain about seven new ones on a variety of snow-makers and other sporting equipment.
Over the years and at locations throughout the world, Ash has watched the ski industry grow. He's either skied at, designed or sent his snow-makers to resorts from Europe to Australia and even Korea. His snow machines can be found at some of America's most famous resorts in Maine, Vermont, Utah and Colorado.
But Winterplace is where Ash is doing most of his skiing this year. He decided to move back to the area after he attended his 50th class reunion in 1997.
"The new owners and employees of Winterplace are doing a good job," said Ash, who has recently taken up windsurfing for the summer months. "They're in the business of making people happy."
Ash said he has no intention to ever quit skiing. In fact, he credits the sport with keeping him youthful and physically fit.
"I've always participated in sports to give my body a good workout and my mind a good cleansing," he said. "When you're active, you're healthier. I love to ski. ... I love to be active."
He's just not sure where the sport will take him next.
"I haven't skied in China yet," he said. "Maybe I'll go there. There are lots of ski resorts to be developed there."
W.Va. ski resort developer Bob Ash dies
This article appeared in the Register-Herald on April 8, 2004.By AUDREY SCHWITZERLETTE and SCOTT NICHOLSON (Watauga Democrat, Boone N. C.)
One of the pioneers of the area's development as a skiing mecca has died.
Bob Ash had returned to his Ghent home, near Winterplace, where he died suddenly March 30. He was 64.
Ash was active in the development of Winterplace and Snowshoe ski resorts. He was the first manager of Sugar Mountain Ski Resort and later worked at Ski Beech, both in North Carolina. And he also held more than a half-dozen patents for snow-making equipment. His latest project was a "snow fountain" he was inventing at the request of a Middle Eastern diplomat for the man's desert palace.
Ash first fell in love with skiing at the age of 3, when his father's Navy career led the family to Boston and Ash witnessed the sport for the first time. At 6, he built his own skis from wood and scraps in the family workshop at his home on Westwood Drive in Beckley.
After graduating from high school, he focused on bringing the sport to West Virginia and was an ardent believer in the economic value of ski slopes to the community. He helped launch his first ski resort when he borrowed $100 to put down as an option on 275 acres that later became Winterplace.
Ash said he "walked in off the street" and got the job of running Sugar Mountain in the early 1970s because of his experience with ski lifts, which he designed and built. He later became the CEO at Beech Mountain, even painting a scale rendering of the mountain.
Fred Pfohl, owner of Fred's General Mercantile on Beech Mountain, worked with Ash in the 1970s when that area's ski industry was just cranking up.
"He was a true genius as far as snow-making," Pfohl said. "I remember the big piles of snow he could lay out with his snow gun."
Ash described those early snow guns as adaptations of agricultural equipment used to create a fog to protect crops from freezing. When the weather was cold enough, snow resulted instead.
"Ash came along and sort of refined snow making," Pfohl said. "He was the 'mad scientist' type. He worked long and hard and stayed up late at night, and was always thinking in the back of his mind about his work."
He started Snow Storms Inc. to sell the snow-making equipment he developed. Ash's technical skill led to a number of inventions, and his designs are used in slopes in both the United States and Europe.
He started a Ski Area Management course at Appalachian State University and also produced and appeared in movies about skiing. He was an advocate of the sport as a source of physical exercise and recreation, and claimed he never had a broken bone in a lifetime of skiing.
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