Smuggler's Notch
| Smugglers' Notch Resort | |
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Smugglers' Notch as seen from the access road
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| Location | Town of Cambridge, near Jeffersonville, Vermont |
| Nearest city | Burlington, Vermont |
| Coordinates | 44°34′22″N 72°46′34″W / 44.57278°N 72.77611°W |
| Vertical | 796 m (2,610 ft) |
| Top elevation | 1,109 m (3,640 ft) |
| Base elevation | 314 m (1,030 ft) |
| Runs | 78 19% Easy 50% Intermediate 25% Difficult 6% Extremely difficult |
| Lift system | 8 (6 chairlifts, 2 surface lifts) |
| Snowfall | 7.9 m/year (312 in./year) |
| Website | www.smuggs.com |
Smugglers' Notch Resort is a ski resort area in the town of Cambridge, Vermont, United States, located near the village of Jeffersonville. Its vertical drop of 2,610 feet (800 m) is the fourth largest in New England and the third largest in Vermont.Its namesake is a narrow notch (mountain pass) running adjacent to Sterling Mountain, which smugglers used many years ago. Smugglers' Notch, nicknamed Smuggs, consists of three mountains: Morse, Madonna, and Sterling. The resort attracts skiers in the winter and summer vacationers during the warmer months.
Smugglers' Notch was founded in 1956 by a group of Vermont skiers. The first lifts were two pomas (or platter lifts) on Sterling Mountain.
In the early 1960s, Tom Watson, Jr., Chairman of IBM, became involved with the mountain. The site of the village today was an open field and logging station. Watson envisioned a village patterned after those found in Europe. Soon, he developed the nearby Morse and Madonna mountains. It is said that Watson placed the bottom of the Madonna I chairlift several feet below the lodge to obtain the honor of owning the world's longest bottom-drive chairlift at the time.
After this was done, Watson started on the Village at Morse that he had envisioned. He hired Stanley Snider of Stanmar, a Massachusetts-based developer and Martha's Vineyard resort owner, to create that village. After a heart attack, Watson began to divest in some of his business holdings and sold Smuggs to Snider and Stanmar, who operated the resort for years. At that time Terpstra and Morrow constructed a large in-ground pool and 24 four-bedroom, four-bath, pool-front luxury condominiums. Terpstra is still a very active property owner at the entrance of the resort. They hired AT&T's Bill Stritzler, who owned a home at Smuggs, as the Managing Director of the resort. When Snider retired, he sold the resort to Stritzler.
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