A Midwesterner born and raised, and an avid skier since age 4, Joe Wachtel has spent a good part of his 53 years looking for high ground amid flat land.
”When I was growing up, there weren`t many places to ski around the Midwest, and if you said you were a skier people looked at you as if you were daft,” said Wachtel, who calls to mind the actor Wilford Brimley in ski goggles.
Although he has tested his skiing skills in the mountains of Colorado, Canada, Montana, Switzerland and even Yugoslavia, Wachtel prefers the unique challenge of being a flatland downhiller.
”When I was a kid, my mom had a sign hanging in the bathroom that said,
`Bloom where you are planted,` ” he explained.
Wachtel is currently in bloom in the northwest corner of Illinois, where he oversees ski operations for the Prairie State`s only ski lodge and resort, Chestnut Mountain near Galena. The advertising slogan is ”Ski It to Believe It!”
”I enjoy it when people say, `You run a ski resort in Illinois? You gotta be kidding,` ” Wachtel said.
While neighboring Wisconsin has enough natural pitch and roll to support a mini-mountain range of Midwestern ski spots, Illinois terrain is generally considered more suited to cross-country bowling.
There are a few small ski hills in Illinois, but most are either man-made or the product of some geological burp. In fact, there is no mountain under Chestnut Mountain.
On 230 acres about 8 miles south-and up-from Galena, and 155 miles west of Chicago, the state`s only full-fledged ski resort is in its 31st season in spite of its geography, and thanks to its geology.
About 2 million years ago, the Mississippi River carved deep into the dolomite and limestone rock in this region, thoughtfully leaving the makings of a ski resort on the forested 400-foot-high bluffs that drop to the river valley.
The expansive view from those bluffs today might be mistaken for that of some exotic peak out West, and though that is Dubuque, not Durango, in the distance and humble Illinois underfoot, the sight can inspire even a heartland scientist to grandiloquence:
”I`ve stood at the top of that bluff with my skis pointed downhill and I`ve looked across the Mississippi Valley and thought about the fact that the rocks beneath me were deposited there by a warm, shallow, tropical sea 450 million years ago, and after centuries of burial, upheaval and then erosion by the Mississippi River, here I am, a Homo sapien on a ski slope,” said Dennis Kolata of the Illinois Geological Survey.
”That`s a pretty interesting contrast, at least for a geologist,” he added.
Learning is a breeze
For the typical visitor, the geography offers more prosaic charms.
”The slopes here aren`t all that bad, and it`s pretty convenient,” said Jodi Searl, 18, of Galesburg, who was skiing Chestnut during her Christmas break from Marquette University. She plans to spend spring break skiing in Colorado, but returned to the place where she learned for a tuneup.
Searl started skiing at Chestnut at age 7, she said, and has returned regularly over the years, often bringing friends here to teach them.
”It is a really good place to learn,” she said. ”There aren`t as many people and you don`t have many things to worry about. I took my best friend out to Colorado to learn last year, and I am glad I learned here. You don`t have to take as many risks here.”
Katie Miller, 20, of Sandwich, learned to ski at Chestnut about eight years ago. Since then, she has skied in Utah and Colorado, but she still enjoys the Illinois slopes, she said.
”Chestnut is an easier place to ski and a better place to learn,” she said. ”When you are a couple thousand feet up on a mountain and look down you go, `Oh, my God,` but when you are only a couple hundred feet up in the air, it is not as bad.
”And some of the chairlifts in Utah are 10 and 15 minutes long, while here they are just three or four minutes. I have a lot of fun in both places.”
Jennifer Brester, 20, of Mendota, said she finds the often-icy skiing conditions in Illinois more challenging than the mountainous areas where she has skied. ”I have weak legs and it`s easier for me to ski in Utah,” she said. ”But it`s more expensive out there, and this is just two hours away.” `Mine bar` a bust
The river bluffs of the upper Mississippi have long held an attraction for man, though lift tickets were not always required. The same area that now serves neon-coated hot-dog skiers at Chestnut Mountain was home to the first hunters and gatherers to live in the Midwest 10,000 years ago, according to anthropologist Michael Wiant of the Illinois State Museum, in Springfield.
Paleo-Indians built their villages atop the bluffs, as did the mound builders and effigy-maker tribesmen who came later. The native American Fox and Sauk were driven out by European settlers who came up the river to Galena in the 1800s and went to work in the lead mines that still riddle these bluffs beneath the resort.
The mines were known as the New California and Sand Prairie diggings, and some of their shafts occasionally swallow up bits of the resort parking lot, Wachtel said.
Many of the mines are still visible at the base of the ski area, and one of them, now blocked, is just below a chairlift. The original developer of the resort, Chicago builder Ken Johnston, said that when he bought the property in 1959, he intended to turn that lead mine into a bar.
”I hired a local guy who had worked for the mines to put some small charges in to widen the mouth of the cave, but he put in a little bigger charge than we had hoped for,” Johnston recalled.
”The whole damn thing caved in, and that was the end of my mine bar.”
Johnston is now retired and lives next door to the resort on a bluff point with a 40-mile western view. He carved out the ski trails with dynamite and bulldozers. The resort`s Alpine lodge, which now features 128 guest rooms, three restaurants, a nightclub, a bar, an indoor pool and Jacuzzi, and two shops, was built in stages over 20 years, he said.
With a vertical drop of 475 feet from the bluffs to the valley floor, Chestnut does a fair imitation of a mountain resort, though Illinois` only major ski resort would probably fit quite neatly in one of the back bowls of Vail Mountain, Colo., which claims to be the largest ski area in North America.
Vail boasts 120 ski runs, a vertical drop of 3,250 feet, and one run that extends 4.5 miles. Last year, Vail served 1.5 million skiers. Chestnut Mountain hosted 80,000.
Then again, a lift ticket at Vail runs about $40, while $25 pays for a day of weekend skiing at Chestnut Mountain.
Chestnut Mountain brochures claim 16 ski runs, the longest measured at 3,500 feet. Wachtel noted that Midwestern ski areas tend to count ”even the line to the ladies room” as skiable terrain.
”We exaggerate at the same rate as everybody else,” he said.
There is some advantage in his resort`s compactness, Wachtel said. Although its ski season runs only from Thanksgiving to St. Patrick`s Day, Chestnut Mountain, which is open year-round, does nearly as much business as many of the mid-sized mountain resorts because its ski areas are lighted, allowing its patrons to frolic from 8:30 a.m. until 10 p.m.
Snow from the Mississippi
Flatland ski operators may embellish some statistics, but they cannot fake mountain weather-or at least they couldn`t until they began making artificial snow. Natural snowfall is like manna from heaven for the Midwestern ski operator. Wachtel dares to pray only for weather cold and dry enough to make his own.
”I always get a kick out of it when the guys from the resorts out West try to tell me how to make snow,” said Wachtel, who calls himself ”Rube Goldberg personified” when it comes to snow-making.
”They didn`t get into artificial snow-making until the late `70s, and I was digging through old plumbing parts to build snow-makers in the `60s,” he said.
Wachtel`s 22 snow-making machines, which cost up to $50,000 each, make for temperamental weaponry in the ski wars.
”You have to be a borderline genius to keep these snow-making machines running,” Wachtel said. ”A half-turn of the screw one way or the other determines whether you make snow or rain.”
The Mississippi River not only created the bluffs for the ski resort, but provides the snow too, Wachtel said. A pair of 200-horsepower vertical turbine pumps in a shed at the bottom of the ski area draw about 40 million gallons out of the river and into the snow-makers each season.
”We don`t pay anything for the water because we only borrow it. Come spring, it just goes right back down the mountain and into the river,”
Wachtel said.
A chill on business
Johnston, the original owner, was not only a pioneer in Midwestern skiing but also a master promoter. In the `60s and `70s, he lured hundreds of Chicagoans to Chestnut Mountain for weekends and day trips by enticing them with a ”Ski Bunny Report” on WMAQ radio, and a cheap ride from the city right to the base of the mountain.
The Burlington Zephyr Ski Train (no longer in business) would depart Chicago at 8:30 a.m. and arrive at the bottom of the ski hill 2 hours and 15 minutes later.
For $11.90, Johnston provided the train trip, lift tickets, rental skis, lunch, dinner and a wave goodbye at 8:30 p.m. when the train returned to Chicago.
”The `70s were boom years for skiing. But even then, when most people in this part of the country thought of skiing, they thought of Wisconsin or Michigan, not Illinois,” said Johnston, who sold the resort to St. Louis businessman Joseph Burstein in 1979.
The big surge in skiing subsided at the end of the `70s-perhaps after carefree Baby Boomers began to settle into child-rearing and other domestic responsibilities-and during the 1980s, even the big mountain resorts experienced a 10 percent drop in business.
Like resorts around the country, Chestnut Mountain`s ski operation experienced a dramatic drop in business just as operating costs soared, according to Burstein.
”Our insurance liability premiums went from $30,000 to $300,000 in just four years,” he said.
A run in the cornfields
Even so, Burstein and Wachtel have continued to upgrade the facility, increasing chairlift capacity and renovating the lodge. Next year they plan to add another expert ski run, a bunny hill ski lift, and more snow-making machines and hotel amenities.
”I can`t make the hills any steeper or any higher, but I can improve and expand the skiing facilities,” Burstein said.
Wachtel is equally resolute in facing the peculiar challenges of Chestnut. In his varied career, which has included stints in the nursery and logging businesses, he has dared to run ski operations around the Midwest, including some in Wisconsin, Michigan, and even the bluffs across the river in Iowa, at the Sundown Ski Area outside Dubuque.
”I liked that too,” he said. ”People would say, `Skiing in Iowa?
C`mon.` ” Wachtel`s passion for skiing came from his parents, both of whom skiied into their 70s, and from a favorite uncle, a Jesuit priest, with whom he spent many boyhood hours searching for ”northeast-facing slopes with skiing possibilities.”
As a teenager, Wachtel`s dream car was not some fancy sportster. ”It was a 1938 Hudson with a Briggs & Stratton motor and pulley mounted on it. We`d find a farm field with some slope to it, hook a rope up to the pulley (to create a rudimentary rope lift) and ski until the sun went down or the snow melted,” said Wachtel, whose three oldest children are all on their college ski teams, in Iowa and Wisconsin.
He still participates in downhill races ”though I have trouble getting my belly through the gate.” He also serves as the only Illinois
representative on the board of directors for the United Ski Industries Association, whose members include operators of ski areas all over the country.
”When I sit in association meetings with the guys from Vail and Aspen and Killington, I`m the token po` folk,” Wachtel said. ”They like me though, because my resort provides them with a little perspective in life.”
Also, he noted, ”We do the missionary work of getting people in the Midwest hooked on skiing so that later they can try the bigger resorts in the East and West.”
