Blue Ridge Country July/August 2023 - 80

LEADERS BY NATURE: THE MOUNTAIN Q & A
RICHARD WELLS:
The Founder of this Magazine Looks Back
Usually our Mountain Q & A asks multiple questions. For this 35th anniversary issue we've asked our founder
and publisher just one: Would you tell us about the background, conception and realization of Blue Ridge Country?
By RICHARD WELLS
O
ne fertile seed of Blue Ridge Country magazine
goes back to the late '60s, when the
high elevations of the Southern Appalachians-particularly
the area between the
Great Smokies and the North Carolina High
Country around Boone-suddenly became
the epicenter for ski development south of
the Mason Dixon Line. Small ski operations sprang up
in Gatlinburg, Maggie Valley and Blowing Rock, and
by the end of the decade Dr. Tom Brigham had spearheaded
two " major " ski areas in Banner Elk, North Carolina,
first at Beech Mountain and five years later at Sugar
Mountain.
Soon those formative rope tows and t-bar areas gave
way to Tyrolian villages, gondolas and the claim as the
highest skiing in Eastern America.
Overnight, Mercedes and Porsches were buzzing
around Atlanta with ski racks. Miami and Atlanta boasted
two of the largest ski clubs in the country. Developers
began building ski chalets and condos around these new
winter resorts.
Newspapers didn't quite know how to handle this
new thing. Skiing was an Olympic sport, so the editors
were inclined to assign coverage to the sports department.
But in the South, if it wasn't something you
kicked, shot or hit, then it really wasn't a sport.
That's where I came in.
In 1970, while holding down my real job at The Assheville
Citizen, I started freelancing for Ziff-Davis, publishers
of SKIING magazine. I soon became their Southern
correspondent (I think I elevated myself to Southern
Editor) for their three ski-related journals, in the same
way I had become the resident expert on skiing at The
Asheville Citizen.
By default! Guy who doesn't even work in the sports
department, gets to cover this new " ski scene " because
there's nobody else to do it. And he wants to.
Realizing that a similar scenario was playing out at
newspapers across the South, I reached out to editors
at metro dailies in the region offering them a series of
features on the Southern skiing phenomenon. The late
Barton Morris, executive editor of The Roanoke Times,
had himself caught the ski bug at
The Homestead and was one of half
a dozen newspapers that published
my columns the next winter.
A year later I accepted a job at
The
Roanoke
Times.
The move
northward along the spine of the
Blue Ridge exposed me to new skifocused
developments in the mountains
of Virginia and West Virginia
and new opportunities.
As a result, in 1972, I published
the first issue of SKI SOUTH,
a 50,000 controlled circulation
" Guide to Southern Skiing, " covering
areas from Sky Valley, Georgia,
to Deep Creek Lake, Maryland.
From that beginning our small
publishing company added city
magazines in Roanoke and Greensboro
in the mid '70s and a number
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Blue Ridge Country July/August 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Blue Ridge Country July/August 2023