King Of The Mountain

At Killington Peak, Preston Smith battled Vermont's untamed widerness and a sluggish bureaucracy. His success revolutionized the skiing industry.

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Twenty-six years ago, Preston Leete Smith stood atop Killington Peak, at 4,241 feet Vermont's second-highest mountain, and surveyed the expanse below: Calvin Coolidge State Forest; the towns of Rutland and Sherburne; and, in the distance, U.S. Route 4, a major highway in the central part of the state. Wilderness spread before him -- frozen miles of untracked, unpopulated wilderness as deep as any in Vermont. No ski trails, no lifts, and no inns, but most of all no people.

Smith had come as an explorer to assess Killington's potential for development, see snow, gauge wind patterns, and figure the mountain's gradients. By the time he stood at the summit, he had toured the entire mountain on the primitive skis of the day. He had satisfied himself that this giant mountain was ideal raw material for a major ski resort -- complete with chairlifts, gondola, and lodges, and, most important, skiers by the thousands, streaming in their multicolored outfits down the undulating white trails, riding up the chairlifts, sipping spiced wine and brandy before the fires of innumerable inns.

Even a vision as confident and far-reaching as Smith's, though, could hardly have included the reality that he would create. Killington, as the centerpiece of Sherburne Corp., would eventually become a skiing complex with not one but six mountain peaks, served by 15 very fast lifts with a combined length of 14 miles. It would provide skiers with a vertical transport capacity (a formula, derived from the vertical rise and speed of lifts, used by the Passenger Tramway Board of the Vermont Department of Labor and Industry to calculate a ski area's "horsepower") of more than 23 million feet per hour. It would accommodate 15,000 skiers a day and generate more than 780,000 skier-days a season. By 1982, Killington would offer 82 trails, a 225-day season, a staff of 800, the world's longest triple chair lift, and 38 miles of trails covered by snowmaking equipment.

As prodigious as Smith's foresight was, he could hardly have expected that the Killington phenomenon, this gargantuan Green Mountain complcx, would change the very nature of skiing and the ways in which ski businesses are built. Preston Smith is a handsome man, 52 years old, slim and tall, with eyes that combine the eolors of Vermont's blue sky and gray granite. There is still an athlete's hardness to his body and a quick precision to the way he moves -- shifting in his chair, rearranging papers on his desk, skiing the deep moguls on Killington's steepest runs. Smith came late to skiing. He took a single ski trip while in prep school in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and then forgot all about it when he went off to study agricultural science at Earlham College in Indiana. His grandparents owned a farm back in Guilford, Conn., and Smith had planned to take his degree and come back east. "But when I got through, I really didn't know what I wanted to do," he says. "I was sort of confused about everything. So I just went and picked up a job in a silk-screen printing plant in Guilford."

It was an entry-level position, but in short order he found himself managing production despite his lack of formal business training or any prior knowledge of silk screening. At about that time, Smith picked up skiing again. It didn't take long for him to realize what it was that he wanted to do with his life. "It was late '54 that I decided I liked skiing so much that I ought to get into the business. Either buy a ski lodge or build a ski area. It didn't really make much difference to me at that point. I just wanted into the business."

It was an audacious idea. Even in those early days, when ski areas consisted of rope tows and rock-stream slashes through the forests, a considerable amount of capital -- not to mention technieal expertise -- was needed to develop them. Smith, who most days lacked the price of a lift ticket and who had been educated as a farmer, didn't seem to possess the prime requisites for creating a ski area.

"Maybe it was a kind of naive approach to the thing," he admits now. "I had no formal business background; I really didn't understand what I was getting into. But that wasn't the point. The point was that I loved the sport and I could see that other people loved it as much as I did. Therefore, it had to be good. I didn't see any reason why it couldn't be done."

So Smith went looking for a mountain. He had spent, by then, a great deal of time skiing at Stowe and knew that Vermont was where he wanted to be. But early on, after a disappointing statewide search, his plans nearly ground to a halt: "I found that there weren't any huge numbers of mountains available to develop," he says. Then he met Perry Merrill, an official of the state department of forests and parks, who told him about Killington.

"I didn't even know Killington existed," Smith says. "Nobody knew about Killington. It was so far back [in Calvin Coolidge State Forest], way back in the mountains, away from any traveled road."

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