MWLSAP

mark@mwlsap.org

Midwest Lost Ski Areas Project

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Galaxy Hills History

Hi Mark.  Thank you  for your interest of the Galaxy Hills Ski Area Story.

It all started when Max and Gayla Cook in Blanchard bought 80 near their farm on back taxe in 1964s.  The property was a large hill covered with trees but the 2nd highest elevation in Isabella County.  Skiing was  starting to become popular throughout the nation,  so the challenge was on.  Along with sons Dan, Brad and Scott, ages 11 to 15, started first tearing down an old house on our farm and  used the lumber to build all of the footings for the 28 by 52 foot Lodge.  We had to dig the footings and build the footing and dig out a large hole for the foundation for the fire place.  My brothers and myself spent about 3 hours digging out the hole, dad jumped down from the footings and caved in part of the foundation hole.  The digging had to continue for a little while longer but its been a family story until this day.  Nest pour the footings with a small 9N Ford tractor with a borrowed rear cement mixer.  All of the water to mix the cement was hauled from the farm on the farm truck with a horse trough on the bed.   WE hauled tons of stones from the neighbors property to fill the footings with to reduce the amount of cement needed.  Mix, pour, stones and repeat.

     You need lumber to build a Lodge.  Max borrowed a chain saw from a neighbor and cut trees off the farm and loaded them on the farm truck and hauled them to Six Lakes where a guy had a local saw mill and had the logs sawed into lumber.  I remember the front of the truck bouncing off the ground because the log hung out over the back of the truck bed.  We worked along with the owner and his wife to stack, plane and load the lumber I remember that the guy had 3 fingers missing at the cost of running a saw mill and his wife would cut the slab wood and throw int out a window outside..  All of this was accomplished with multiple trips.  Max was going to build the trusts from the logs but these logs were 30 feet long and he finally found a guy near Lakeview who had a saw mill set up in his woods that could handle 30 feet long logs powered by a steam engine.  Next he nailed sheets of plywood on the ground and drew out the trust pattern and we built all of the trusts all glued and nailed.  Let's start building.  We started by building the walls with the 2 x 4's sawed from the woods and got them set.  A sliding glass door was going in on the west side of the Lodge and I remember putting a 4" x 12" x 12 foot Oak beam over the door with an old shakey  loader trying to set that.  There were no issued but it was touch and go.  In  the mean time a local stone Mason by the name of Clayten Miller and his mud helper Fred Robison was building the fireplace.  You can guess who had to haul all of the stones.  We split stones but Dan split most of them.  After the walls were up it was time to set the trusts.  Remember that this was in 1964.  A local retired farmer by the Name of Otto Larsen arrived with a small Ford tractor with a loader.  We chained a telephone pole ot the loader so it would lift the trust high enough to clear the walls.  He would lift one and drive into the Lodge and we set them all with no problems.  From there it was plywood siding, windows, and roof. I remember roofing it on the first day of deer season and hearing bullets whizzing over our heads.  Gayla in the meantime had completed her degree in Cosmotology  (hair dressing) and a beauty shop was built in the north eastern part of the Lodge which she ran very successfully for many years.

     Max continued to work on the Lodge but on the weekends it was cutting and clearing the ski runs.  All winter we hauled logs and burned brush.  When spring came it was ready for a bulldozer to clear the stumps and stones and smooth our the runs.  Now that the runs were cleared a ski tow was needed.  Max went to a junk yard and bought a truck transmission and rear end.  He built a frame in the tool shed at the farm.  He calculated the electric motor RPM, the rear end and tranny RPM and put the proper sized pulley for the right speed which ended up the perfect speed.  He also had to build the idlers and take up unit to tighten the rope  Then build the tow house and wire the tow with the state approved safety switches.  He also added lighting to light the runs for  night skiing.  Until this day, this tow has run flawlessly with the original rope.

     Finally we opened for business in 1965 with moderate success.  We rented skis, gave ski lesion, mostly free when someone would come to ski that had never skied.  I ended up being the traditional ski instructor.  No pay required.  Even later in my life people would mention to me that I was the one that taught them to ski.  Some people I didn't even remember. We would ski weekends and Wednesday nights.  We always had a nice group of local skiers and also from different areas.  Saturday and Sunday mornings were when the local snowmobilers would come for coffee.  Mostly the same locals that never missed a morning.

     In 1965 Max sold the cows and went to work for a local Wood processing company.  In 1971 he took over as Sales Manager and with Gayla Moved to Paduca Kentucky.  At the same time  I went to College, Scott moved to Chicago to work in printing and Dan was raising a family.   So Galaxy Hills set idle for 10 years.

     In 1989 I moved back into the area  and the Lodge was starting to show sighs of neglect, I needed a place to live so  that started the 2ns faze of the life of Galaxy Hills.  The trusts were starting to sag some so for the first 2 months was jacking up the trusts and building support beams length wise to support all of the trusts.  The trick was to buile 2 52 foot beams on the floor and hoist the up to the trusts.  That's a story for another time.  I ended up gutting everything out and built 2 bedrooms, 2 bath home.  We used what materials we could salvage and after 10 months I was moving in.

     Over the years we never opened it up to the public mainly because of the time and cost of running a business when everyone was living their own lives.  Friends would offer me money when they would come out to ski or slide but I never took a penny partly because I felt that people would assume that they could stop out any time and give me some money that it was available any time.  Besides,  it's normally a full slope with just friends and family and I can set the time.  I discovered that if I set a time from 2 to 4, that saved a lot of headache for me.  If I didn't set a start and stop time,  people would stop out at all times of the day.  Especially when everyone was dead tired after skiing and suddenly a couple car loads of people would show about quiting time.  You can't shut the tow off when kids a running for the tow with big smiles on their faces.  But now it's all about fun with friends and families.  We enjoyed it when we were kids,  Now with my friends kids and now their kids.