Remembering Mad River Glen founder Betsy Pratt (1928-2023)

March 19, 2023  |  By David Goodman 

Editor’s note: Mad River Glen founder Betsy Pratt died on Friday. The ski resort now owned as a cooperative thanks to her determination to keep it from ski conglomerates announced the news on social media including Facebook. Waterbury journalist David Goodman shared two stories from his archive where he profiled Pratt in 1992 and 1994. Here is his remembrance along with the articles below. 

Here is to Betsy Pratt, the former owner of Vermont's beloved Mad River Glen, who died Friday, March 17, at the age of 95 while watching the livestream of snow falling on Mad River Glen's famous single chair. Betsy was one of skiing's greatest visionaries. I profiled her in several articles over the years. 

“Pratt is part flower child and part reluctant businesswoman. She owns what many expert skiers insist is the most challenging mountain in the East," I wrote in Powder magazine in 1992.

Betsy was impossible, in a charming way, which is what kept MRG from being bought by rapacious ski conglomerates that coveted her ski area and longed to add it as another feather in their corporate caps. Betsy "is at once endearing and discomforting – combative and brusque at one moment, charming and complimentary in the next," I wrote in Yankee Magazine in 1994 for their House for Sale section. Betsy was indeed selling a unique "house" – her ski area. It was for sale, but not to you. Or anyone else who wanted it, it turned out.

“Despite her professed eagerness to sell the mountain, Pratt has periodically moved the goalposts. Potential buyers have discovered that her conditions of sale are mysteriously fluid, as fickle and unpredictable as the weather on Stark Mountain itself,” I wrote in Yankee. She ultimately sold the mountain to a cooperative of its skiers in 1995. MRG remains the only cooperatively owned ski area in the country.

“Skiing is a gift, not a given,” she told me in our interview for Powder magazine. “If you are looking for the gift on the mountain that day, it really becomes quite exciting. I have no expectations when I go out there as to what will be there.”

“I believe the mountains belong first to the local communities and that they should have a say what they want their mountains to be. If it is only big corporations controlling mountains and the local community, I think that's unfortunate. The initial gift of the mountain was to the local community and they should have the say.”

I concluded by asking her whether she was angry about what has become of skiing today. “I'm a golfer. I couldn't care less. Now if someone bulldozed the Troon golf course in Scotland, which is my favorite golf course, I would be furious,” she replied.

Thank you Betsy for a gift that will enrich our community and the lives of generations of skiers to come. Rest In Powder.

Waterbury Center resident and backcountry skiing expert David Goodman is a bestselling author of a dozen books, host of the public affairs radio show and podcast The Vermont Conversation, and a freelance journalist who writes for national publications.