Carolina Mountain life Holiday/Early Winter 2011-12 — 1716 — Holiday/Early Winter 2011-12 Carolina Mountain life

“He was building a ski resort and it seemed the folks in Boone weren’t in-terested,” Moretz remembered. “I was in the lumber business so I told him I’d hear what he had to say.”

Thalheimer wanted to use rough-hewn pine or wavy board for the lodge exterior. Robbins had used it extensively in the past, so much so, it had become known as Blowing Rock siding, a look still prevalent fifty years later.

“Some called it rind board, but what-ever you called it, you needed big logs and I had a sawmill cutting some right then,” the younger Moretz said.

Bill Farthing of Beaver Dam pro-vided rough-hewn, adze finished beams. The pine flooring, siding, and beams en-dure to this day.

The 12 thousand square foot build-ing was uncomplicated in its shape and designed for utility. “This was a huge building for the time,” Grady’s daughter Brenda exclaimed fifty years later. “What a dream he had…what an investment he made.”

It was so cold the day they poured the building’s foundation the men built fires to help the concrete cure. When the truck from Hickory Steel arrived in a blinding snowstorm they had to ask for help locating the job site. “If you’d gone another ten feet you would have hit it,” Hayes told a bewildered driver.

Right away the Thalheimer family went on the offensive to let the world know what was going on at the Blow-ing Rock Ski Lodge. “My mother wrote most of the press releases and my brother and I stuffed a lot of envelopes,” Ben said.

“My dad was a new idea kind of guy, and a bottom line kind of guy. He did things right, but he could pinch a penny.”

Young Ben and his older brother Marc split time between Blowing Rock and their Charlotte home. At first they’d catch the bus, which after a serpentine route through the Carolina Piedmont, would roll into the hardware store/bus station on Main Street. Once nearby Tweetsie Railroad opened for the sum-mer, the boys hitched a ride with Char-lotte TV personality Fred Kirby, the singing cowboy, who played to large crowds weekends at the new and suc-cessful amusement park. Kirby’s big Ca-dillac beat the bus by a mile.

Meanwhile, Thalheimer and his team raced toward a December, 1962 opening having missed a target date a year earlier. Three enormous piston-type air com-pressors, sold second hand from an ice plant in Chicago, would drive the Larch-mont snow guns. Two rope tows and a T-bar were yet to be completed. Aus-trian Toni Krasovic was hired to head the ski school, but Thalheimer was just as keen on his snowmaking experience at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs. Rental inventory was on the way. A caf-eteria was built and dances were planned to deliver the total après ski experience.

Money was tight. “They got into debt faster than they

could sell stock,” Moretz said. “I didn’t know it but I was financing it by pro-viding the building materials. Stock sales were slow and all the sub-contractors were taking stock in partial payment. They asked us if we would, too. I figured it was better than nothing. We could, and would, and did.”

Thalheimer’s grand opening was a festive affair even as the last details were completed behind the scenes. Frank Coffey hung the last T-bar seat fifteen minutes before Miss Watauga County, Pat Pittman, cut the ceremonial rib-bon. Local dignitaries and media types joined the genuinely curious at the High Country’s first ski resort--the only resort publicly traded at the time. More than 900 stockholders of the Blowing Rock Ski Lodge assured plenty of interested bystanders. Cars lined up all the way to Hwy 321.

“Opening day was very hectic,” Bux-ton-Jones recalled. “Everyone was telling

everyone else what to do with no one re-ally knowing what to do. I don’t remem-ber anyone who lived here who had ever skied before.”

For ten year-old Ben, who was on crutches from a football injury, his role was clearly defined. “My job was to stay as invisible as possible,” he said, manage-ment having determined that the sight of Bill Thalheimer’s son on crutches wouldn’t be very good for business.

The same month, half-way across the country in Colorado, Vail ski resort opened for the first time.

Under sunny skies the first southern skiers navigated the new slopes on wood-en skis, cable bindings, leather boots, and bamboo poles. They had absolutely no idea what they were getting into. A re-porter from the Charlotte News would write, “Bill Thalheimer graciously rents out all necessary paraphanalia except heat pads and seat cushions.”

And they had the time of their life. “Most of the crowds were on week-

ends,” Jones observed, “but the crowds were tremendous.” A veritable Who’s Who’ came to bear witness that auspi-cious opening weekend. Thalheimer’s guests included retailer John Belk, fu-ture Governor Terry Sanford, and Miss North Carolina.

The sudden success illustrated the acute shortage of winter accommoda-tions in town. Visitors had three din-ing choices; the ski lodge, Aunt Emma’s Luncheonette in the building, now home to Woodland’s Bar-B-Cue, and Sonny’s Grill on Main Street. Only Emma’s served an evening meal, and all but the ski lodge are gone, but Blowing Rock has since grown into a world-class din-ing destination. In time, more and more motel and vacation properties would re-main open during the winter and cater to skiers. In fact, following the success of the Blowing Rock Ski Lodge, a new High Country ski resort would open ev-ery two years for the next decade. Today, the total economic impact generated by North Carolina ski resorts is more than $145 million.*

Even for a big dreamer, success like that would have been hard to imagine. Because of Bill Thalheimer’s vision, southern skiing’s forgotten man, winter in these mountains would never be the same. *NCSki Areas Assoc. Economic Value Analysis 2009-10

Dining Room at the Blowing Rock Ski Lodge

THALHEIMER from previous page ...

THALH

EIM

ER

absolutely PriCeless!Holiday/earlyWinter 2011/12

Hometown treasures / winter outback / deer tales

citizens of tHe century / app ski mtn golden anniversary

recipes / books / art / wine / fisHing / & mucH more . . .

CMlCarolina Mountain lifeThe Heart & Soul of the High Country

“...always a wonderful read!”

Carolina Mountain life Holiday/Early Winter 2011-12 — 1514 — Holiday/Early Winter 2011-12 Carolina Mountain life

Bill ThalheimerSouthern Skiing’s Forgotten ManBy Tom McAuliffe

Fifty years ago snow skiing made its

formal debut at the Blowing Rock Ski Lodge.

Today, AppSkiMtn is the embodiment of success

under the direction of the Moretz family, who, back

in 1968, picked up the pieces of one man’s shattered

dream and preserved his deserving legacy.

Nineteen Sixty was a semi-nal year for winter sport in America. Squaw Valley, California was the un-likely host of the Winter

Olympics, having upset a surefire bid by sponsors from Innsbruck, Austria. It was a first for America and the first winter games covered extensively by television. A national audience watched the snow fall so heavily that February the alpine ski events were delayed for three days. In the end, American Penny Pitou won sil-ver medals in women’s downhill and gi-ant slalom, while teammate Betty Snite captured silver in the slalom. And in what has become known as the “forgot-ten miracle,” the U.S. mens’ ice hockey team beat heavily favored Canada in the final to win their first ever gold medal.

While those games were a triumph for America, folks in the High Country watched and wondered if it was going to stop snowing in the Blue Ridge Moun-tains. That winter, each Wednesday brought another delivery of fresh snow. By March, National Guard helicopters were dropping hay bales into the fields to feed stranded livestock as most farm roads were impassable for trucks and even tractors.

In the eyes of Boone attorney and civic leader Wade Brown, however, the apocalyptic winter presented opportu-nity. With snowfall at record levels, the

irrepressible Brown made his way to Miller Brothers Army--Navy Store on Depot Street, bought a pair of wooden skis, boots and poles, called a photog-rapher from the Watauga Democrat and told him to grab his camera. The pair climbed a snow covered hill at the Boone Golf Club as Brown posed atop his skis--poles in hand--for a picture that the Democrat would run front page and share over the newswires. The photo went viral, appearing in hundreds of newspapers in the southeast. Wouldn’t it be something, Brown wondered, if one day winter proved as attractive to visitors as the mountain summer had been since the days of the horseless carriage.

Little did he know know at the time, but a singularly rare entrepreneur, liv-ing in Charlotte at the time of his photo shoot, was poised to do just that. And while his trail blazing vision thrives fifty years later at Appalachian Ski Mtn., Bill Thalheimer’s personal victory, in a fate similar to that of the 1960 U.S. Hockey team, was destined to become another forgotten miracle.

Marcus Edwin Thalheimer was born in Selma, Alabama in 1908. He would graduate from the University of Ala-bama and navigate a winding trail that would lead him to West Virginia, Char-lotte, and ultimately the North Carolina High Country.

By his first wife he fathered two

daughters, Lynn and Joanne, and with his second wife fathered two sons, Mar-cus, Jr. and Ben. A dynamic personal-ity, and a southern gentleman by all accounts, Thalheimer was known to his friends and family as ‘Bill’.

He found success and fulfillment op-erating a chain of movie houses in West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky at a time when the local theater was the en-tertainment core of every small town in America.

“That was his first love,” remembered son Ben. “He loved the entertainment business and he loved people. Remem-ber, back then, movie stars didn’t go on the Tonight Show to promote upcoming movies, they’d make personal appearanc-es in your town on the theater stage. Roy Rogers appeared at one of Dad’s movie theaters.”

As the movie industry changed, Bill changed too and moved to Charlotte where he opened a general wholesale supply house where he ran a vending machine business on the side. But things just weren’t the same.

“He didn’t have the same interaction with people that he enjoyed in West Vir-ginia,” Ben said of his father in his new role. “He missed that most of all and he wanted to get back in the entertainment business.”

He found that enterprise, his return to the Big Top, on a mountain just out-side of Blowing Rock, the quiet resort

town that attracted thousands of visitors and vacation homeowners every sum-mer. No stranger to mountain winters, Thalheimer set out to bring skiing to the High Country. Of his choice of lo-cations, Thalheimer said that Blowing Rock had cachet. “It’s the most famous town between Newport, Rhode Island and Palm Beach, Florida,” he said, a pre-scient observation that still rings true today.

He secured 43 acres from Grover Robbins, Jr. who along with brothers Harry and Spencer had built the Tweet-sie Railroad and would later develop Hound Ears, Beech Mountain and Lin-ville Land Harbor. Located at the end of Edmisten Road off Hwy. 321 the tract was just a spit from the Blue Ridge Parkway. A newspaper man would later describe the two mile entrance road to the ski lodge as “a snaky dirt road.”

“And that was on a good day,” re-called one old timer of the roadway bet-ter suited to cattle.

Thalheimer planned to capitalize the venture with an initial stock offering of 375,000 shares at $10 per share. He went to the office of the North Carolina Secretary of State in Raleigh to find out what permits he would need to build a ski resort in Blowing Rock to which the clerk replied, “What for, the boats?”

In time, 305,000 shares for the Blow-ing Rock Ski Lodge were sold, but not at the $10 price per share originally in-

tended. The Secretary of State Thad Eure ordered they be sold at $1, reflecting in his view, a more realistic value. Eure also required that the stock offering state “This Issue is Strictly a Speculation.”

But Thalheimer was undaunted. He had his teeth into the project now and he was determined. In his signature as-cot and fedora, he cut a dashing figure, tempered by his southern upbringing. “My father was always such a dynamic businessman. It was what he did,” Ben explained. He was sharp and intelligent, and a southern gentleman. In all my life I never heard an unkind word said about my dad.”

Thalheimer hired local builder Lloyd Robbins to oversee construction of the lodge. L.A. Reynolds Company of Win-ston-Salem was hired to do the initial grading and site work, build the hold-ing pond for snowmaking, and carve out the slopes. (Four years later the Reynolds group would take this experience and build the four-season resort on Seven Devils). Jim and Bill Winkler installed the plumbing and heating, and Ira Ay-ers installed the electrical service. Abb Hayes, Butch Triplett, and Anne Buxton were among the first local employees hired during construction. The Hayes family were stone masons and just re-turning to Blowing Rock after several years building on the campus of Duke University. For the small summer resort town, the building of the Blowing Rock

Ski Lodge proved a boon to the local winter economy.

In 1960 Blowing Rock there was only one hotel, the Appalachian Mo-tel, that remained opened in the winter. All the other housing was closed-up until spring, or inhabited by local folks. Thalheimer’s most pressing problem was finding any place to rent for his family that was properly insulated for winter. Spencer Robbins had a home near the Mayview Manor and they settled in.

“Back then you could fire a cannon down mainstreet after Labor Day and not hit a thing,” remembered Anne Bux-ton Jones, then a twenty year-old Blow-ing Rock native who left her job at the phone company to work for Thalheimer. “It was wonderful and brought lots of activity to town …jobs were scarce and you worked hard to keep one, so I felt fortunate to be in at the beginning. It was like a family.”

But not even Thalheimer’s winning way could overcome every skeptic in the community. When it came time to build, he was having trouble striking a deal among the building supply businesses in Boone.

Lloyd Robbins brought Thalheimer to the V.L. Moretz & Son building sup-ply in Deep Gap where they met with Grady Moretz, Jr., the grandson of com-pany founder Virgil Lafayette Moretz.

L to R: New T-Bar up and running, 1962 / Tony Krasovic at one of the Larchmont snow guns / By 1968 Grady Moretz would find himself in charge at the newly christened Appalachian Ski Mtn.Bill Thalheimer in his signature ascot

Continued on next page ...

THALH

EIM

ER

THALHEIMER

Carolina Mountain life Holiday/Early Winter 2011-12 — 1514 — Holiday/Early Winter 2011-12 Carolina Mountain life

Bill ThalheimerSouthern Skiing’s Forgotten ManBy Tom McAuliffe

Fifty years ago snow skiing made its

formal debut at the Blowing Rock Ski Lodge.

Today, AppSkiMtn is the embodiment of success

under the direction of the Moretz family, who, back

in 1968, picked up the pieces of one man’s shattered

dream and preserved his deserving legacy.

Nineteen Sixty was a semi-nal year for winter sport in America. Squaw Valley, California was the un-likely host of the Winter

Olympics, having upset a surefire bid by sponsors from Innsbruck, Austria. It was a first for America and the first winter games covered extensively by television. A national audience watched the snow fall so heavily that February the alpine ski events were delayed for three days. In the end, American Penny Pitou won sil-ver medals in women’s downhill and gi-ant slalom, while teammate Betty Snite captured silver in the slalom. And in what has become known as the “forgot-ten miracle,” the U.S. mens’ ice hockey team beat heavily favored Canada in the final to win their first ever gold medal.

While those games were a triumph for America, folks in the High Country watched and wondered if it was going to stop snowing in the Blue Ridge Moun-tains. That winter, each Wednesday brought another delivery of fresh snow. By March, National Guard helicopters were dropping hay bales into the fields to feed stranded livestock as most farm roads were impassable for trucks and even tractors.

In the eyes of Boone attorney and civic leader Wade Brown, however, the apocalyptic winter presented opportu-nity. With snowfall at record levels, the

irrepressible Brown made his way to Miller Brothers Army--Navy Store on Depot Street, bought a pair of wooden skis, boots and poles, called a photog-rapher from the Watauga Democrat and told him to grab his camera. The pair climbed a snow covered hill at the Boone Golf Club as Brown posed atop his skis--poles in hand--for a picture that the Democrat would run front page and share over the newswires. The photo went viral, appearing in hundreds of newspapers in the southeast. Wouldn’t it be something, Brown wondered, if one day winter proved as attractive to visitors as the mountain summer had been since the days of the horseless carriage.

Little did he know know at the time, but a singularly rare entrepreneur, liv-ing in Charlotte at the time of his photo shoot, was poised to do just that. And while his trail blazing vision thrives fifty years later at Appalachian Ski Mtn., Bill Thalheimer’s personal victory, in a fate similar to that of the 1960 U.S. Hockey team, was destined to become another forgotten miracle.

Marcus Edwin Thalheimer was born in Selma, Alabama in 1908. He would graduate from the University of Ala-bama and navigate a winding trail that would lead him to West Virginia, Char-lotte, and ultimately the North Carolina High Country.

By his first wife he fathered two

daughters, Lynn and Joanne, and with his second wife fathered two sons, Mar-cus, Jr. and Ben. A dynamic personal-ity, and a southern gentleman by all accounts, Thalheimer was known to his friends and family as ‘Bill’.

He found success and fulfillment op-erating a chain of movie houses in West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky at a time when the local theater was the en-tertainment core of every small town in America.

“That was his first love,” remembered son Ben. “He loved the entertainment business and he loved people. Remem-ber, back then, movie stars didn’t go on the Tonight Show to promote upcoming movies, they’d make personal appearanc-es in your town on the theater stage. Roy Rogers appeared at one of Dad’s movie theaters.”

As the movie industry changed, Bill changed too and moved to Charlotte where he opened a general wholesale supply house where he ran a vending machine business on the side. But things just weren’t the same.

“He didn’t have the same interaction with people that he enjoyed in West Vir-ginia,” Ben said of his father in his new role. “He missed that most of all and he wanted to get back in the entertainment business.”

He found that enterprise, his return to the Big Top, on a mountain just out-side of Blowing Rock, the quiet resort

town that attracted thousands of visitors and vacation homeowners every sum-mer. No stranger to mountain winters, Thalheimer set out to bring skiing to the High Country. Of his choice of lo-cations, Thalheimer said that Blowing Rock had cachet. “It’s the most famous town between Newport, Rhode Island and Palm Beach, Florida,” he said, a pre-scient observation that still rings true today.

He secured 43 acres from Grover Robbins, Jr. who along with brothers Harry and Spencer had built the Tweet-sie Railroad and would later develop Hound Ears, Beech Mountain and Lin-ville Land Harbor. Located at the end of Edmisten Road off Hwy. 321 the tract was just a spit from the Blue Ridge Parkway. A newspaper man would later describe the two mile entrance road to the ski lodge as “a snaky dirt road.”

“And that was on a good day,” re-called one old timer of the roadway bet-ter suited to cattle.

Thalheimer planned to capitalize the venture with an initial stock offering of 375,000 shares at $10 per share. He went to the office of the North Carolina Secretary of State in Raleigh to find out what permits he would need to build a ski resort in Blowing Rock to which the clerk replied, “What for, the boats?”

In time, 305,000 shares for the Blow-ing Rock Ski Lodge were sold, but not at the $10 price per share originally in-

tended. The Secretary of State Thad Eure ordered they be sold at $1, reflecting in his view, a more realistic value. Eure also required that the stock offering state “This Issue is Strictly a Speculation.”

But Thalheimer was undaunted. He had his teeth into the project now and he was determined. In his signature as-cot and fedora, he cut a dashing figure, tempered by his southern upbringing. “My father was always such a dynamic businessman. It was what he did,” Ben explained. He was sharp and intelligent, and a southern gentleman. In all my life I never heard an unkind word said about my dad.”

Thalheimer hired local builder Lloyd Robbins to oversee construction of the lodge. L.A. Reynolds Company of Win-ston-Salem was hired to do the initial grading and site work, build the hold-ing pond for snowmaking, and carve out the slopes. (Four years later the Reynolds group would take this experience and build the four-season resort on Seven Devils). Jim and Bill Winkler installed the plumbing and heating, and Ira Ay-ers installed the electrical service. Abb Hayes, Butch Triplett, and Anne Buxton were among the first local employees hired during construction. The Hayes family were stone masons and just re-turning to Blowing Rock after several years building on the campus of Duke University. For the small summer resort town, the building of the Blowing Rock

Ski Lodge proved a boon to the local winter economy.

In 1960 Blowing Rock there was only one hotel, the Appalachian Mo-tel, that remained opened in the winter. All the other housing was closed-up until spring, or inhabited by local folks. Thalheimer’s most pressing problem was finding any place to rent for his family that was properly insulated for winter. Spencer Robbins had a home near the Mayview Manor and they settled in.

“Back then you could fire a cannon down mainstreet after Labor Day and not hit a thing,” remembered Anne Bux-ton Jones, then a twenty year-old Blow-ing Rock native who left her job at the phone company to work for Thalheimer. “It was wonderful and brought lots of activity to town …jobs were scarce and you worked hard to keep one, so I felt fortunate to be in at the beginning. It was like a family.”

But not even Thalheimer’s winning way could overcome every skeptic in the community. When it came time to build, he was having trouble striking a deal among the building supply businesses in Boone.

Lloyd Robbins brought Thalheimer to the V.L. Moretz & Son building sup-ply in Deep Gap where they met with Grady Moretz, Jr., the grandson of com-pany founder Virgil Lafayette Moretz.

L to R: New T-Bar up and running, 1962 / Tony Krasovic at one of the Larchmont snow guns / By 1968 Grady Moretz would find himself in charge at the newly christened Appalachian Ski Mtn.Bill Thalheimer in his signature ascot

Continued on next page ...

THALH

EIM

ER

THALHEIMER

Carolina Mountain life Holiday/Early Winter 2011-12 — 1716 — Holiday/Early Winter 2011-12 Carolina Mountain life

“He was building a ski resort and it seemed the folks in Boone weren’t in-terested,” Moretz remembered. “I was in the lumber business so I told him I’d hear what he had to say.”

Thalheimer wanted to use rough-hewn pine or wavy board for the lodge exterior. Robbins had used it extensively in the past, so much so, it had become known as Blowing Rock siding, a look still prevalent fifty years later.

“Some called it rind board, but what-ever you called it, you needed big logs and I had a sawmill cutting some right then,” the younger Moretz said.

Bill Farthing of Beaver Dam pro-vided rough-hewn, adze finished beams. The pine flooring, siding, and beams en-dure to this day.

The 12 thousand square foot build-ing was uncomplicated in its shape and designed for utility. “This was a huge building for the time,” Grady’s daughter Brenda exclaimed fifty years later. “What a dream he had…what an investment he made.”

It was so cold the day they poured the building’s foundation the men built fires to help the concrete cure. When the truck from Hickory Steel arrived in a blinding snowstorm they had to ask for help locating the job site. “If you’d gone another ten feet you would have hit it,” Hayes told a bewildered driver.

Right away the Thalheimer family went on the offensive to let the world know what was going on at the Blow-ing Rock Ski Lodge. “My mother wrote most of the press releases and my brother and I stuffed a lot of envelopes,” Ben said.

“My dad was a new idea kind of guy, and a bottom line kind of guy. He did things right, but he could pinch a penny.”

Young Ben and his older brother Marc split time between Blowing Rock and their Charlotte home. At first they’d catch the bus, which after a serpentine route through the Carolina Piedmont, would roll into the hardware store/bus station on Main Street. Once nearby Tweetsie Railroad opened for the sum-mer, the boys hitched a ride with Char-lotte TV personality Fred Kirby, the singing cowboy, who played to large crowds weekends at the new and suc-cessful amusement park. Kirby’s big Ca-dillac beat the bus by a mile.

Meanwhile, Thalheimer and his team raced toward a December, 1962 opening having missed a target date a year earlier. Three enormous piston-type air com-pressors, sold second hand from an ice plant in Chicago, would drive the Larch-mont snow guns. Two rope tows and a T-bar were yet to be completed. Aus-trian Toni Krasovic was hired to head the ski school, but Thalheimer was just as keen on his snowmaking experience at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs. Rental inventory was on the way. A caf-eteria was built and dances were planned to deliver the total après ski experience.

Money was tight. “They got into debt faster than they

could sell stock,” Moretz said. “I didn’t know it but I was financing it by pro-viding the building materials. Stock sales were slow and all the sub-contractors were taking stock in partial payment. They asked us if we would, too. I figured it was better than nothing. We could, and would, and did.”

Thalheimer’s grand opening was a festive affair even as the last details were completed behind the scenes. Frank Coffey hung the last T-bar seat fifteen minutes before Miss Watauga County, Pat Pittman, cut the ceremonial rib-bon. Local dignitaries and media types joined the genuinely curious at the High Country’s first ski resort--the only resort publicly traded at the time. More than 900 stockholders of the Blowing Rock Ski Lodge assured plenty of interested bystanders. Cars lined up all the way to Hwy 321.

“Opening day was very hectic,” Bux-ton-Jones recalled. “Everyone was telling

everyone else what to do with no one re-ally knowing what to do. I don’t remem-ber anyone who lived here who had ever skied before.”

For ten year-old Ben, who was on crutches from a football injury, his role was clearly defined. “My job was to stay as invisible as possible,” he said, manage-ment having determined that the sight of Bill Thalheimer’s son on crutches wouldn’t be very good for business.

The same month, half-way across the country in Colorado, Vail ski resort opened for the first time.

Under sunny skies the first southern skiers navigated the new slopes on wood-en skis, cable bindings, leather boots, and bamboo poles. They had absolutely no idea what they were getting into. A re-porter from the Charlotte News would write, “Bill Thalheimer graciously rents out all necessary paraphanalia except heat pads and seat cushions.”

And they had the time of their life. “Most of the crowds were on week-

ends,” Jones observed, “but the crowds were tremendous.” A veritable Who’s Who’ came to bear witness that auspi-cious opening weekend. Thalheimer’s guests included retailer John Belk, fu-ture Governor Terry Sanford, and Miss North Carolina.

The sudden success illustrated the acute shortage of winter accommoda-tions in town. Visitors had three din-ing choices; the ski lodge, Aunt Emma’s Luncheonette in the building, now home to Woodland’s Bar-B-Cue, and Sonny’s Grill on Main Street. Only Emma’s served an evening meal, and all but the ski lodge are gone, but Blowing Rock has since grown into a world-class din-ing destination. In time, more and more motel and vacation properties would re-main open during the winter and cater to skiers. In fact, following the success of the Blowing Rock Ski Lodge, a new High Country ski resort would open ev-ery two years for the next decade. Today, the total economic impact generated by North Carolina ski resorts is more than $145 million.*

Even for a big dreamer, success like that would have been hard to imagine. Because of Bill Thalheimer’s vision, southern skiing’s forgotten man, winter in these mountains would never be the same. *NCSki Areas Assoc. Economic Value Analysis 2009-10

Dining Room at the Blowing Rock Ski Lodge

THALHEIMER from previous page ...

THALH

EIM

ER

absolutely PriCeless!Holiday/earlyWinter 2011/12

Hometown treasures / winter outback / deer tales

citizens of tHe century / app ski mtn golden anniversary

recipes / books / art / wine / fisHing / & mucH more . . .

CMlCarolina Mountain lifeThe Heart & Soul of the High Country

“...always a wonderful read!”