Ever wonder why there are so many kids buzzing past you on the slopes of the Dartmouth Skiway, many of them 8- to 10-year-olds flashing down the black diamonds like they own the place? Credit one of the College’s longest running, least known and most successful town-gown arrangements: free skiing for the children of Lyme, New Hampshire.

In 1955, when the College quietly bought 648 acres on and around Holt’s Ledge in Lyme with a plan to open a ski area there the following year, one of the first considerations was to invite the host community into the planning process. For starters, since Dartmouth is tax-exempt, a good-sized chunk of the newly purchased land was going to disappear from the small town’s tax rolls. To mitigate that and other negative effects such as increased traffic, Harry Sanborn, a longtime Lyme resident and member of the ad-hoc Dartmouth committee that did the original feasibility study, suggested the College offer free skiing to the town’s children. No one objected, and when the Skiway opened the next year an informal deal to let the local kids ski for free came with it. And what a deal it was: A Lyme “child” was any resident under the age of 19 or still enrolled in school—even college.

The arrangement has been in effect ever since, though like most informal understandings that eventually catch the attention of the legal profession, this one is now memorialized as a written agreement. College trustees and the Town of Lyme didn’t get around to producing that document until 2002. For the four previous decades all a young local skier needed was to get a ride to the lodge, say “Lyme kid” at the ticket window and get in the lift line. Today it’s a bit more complicated, but not much: fill out a form, have a picture taken and get handed a free personalized season pass. Every year about 300 Lyme kids do exactly that, picking up a free season pass worth between $225 and $399, depending on the age of the recipient.

Not only has the program kept a bunch of Lyme kids from becoming mall rats, it’s also helped to produce an Olympian. Liz McIntyre ’87, who competed in three Games and won a silver medal in the moguls at Lillehammer in 1994, began skiing in Lyme in utero. “Mom skied when she was pregnant with me,” says McIntyre, who now lives in Granby, Colorado. “I skied as soon as I could after that, maybe at 2 1/2 or 3. My friend Jenny Smith and I loved watching the two head ski instructors. We would play them—Hans [Zopf] and Simon [Mayer]—every day till the fourth grade.”

McIntyre’s niece, Chelsea Little ’09, a member of the Dartmouth ski team, is another beneficiary of the program. “Once I got to be old enough,” she says, “maybe in fourth or fifth grade, I would be dropped off at the Skiway on a weekend day and spend all day skiing with my friend Hazel Kent ’09. We’d ski a few runs and then sit in the old lodge. I was always given a dollar or two and my own powdered hot cocoa mix, so all I had to do was ask for hot water. We’d sit in front of the fire to warm up.”

Even with unlimited access to the slopes, top-level skiers such as McIntyre and Little don’t develop without some early instruction. From the beginning Lyme kids have been given free lessons, provided by parents and others and facilitated by the local school.

“School let out early on Wednesday,” recalls McIntyre’s father, Ross ’53, retired director of the Norris Cotton Cancer Center at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. “In the morning as they arrived at school, kids would drop their skis in an old sawed-off pickup truck bed that had been converted to a trailer and someone would tow it up to the Skiway before the kids got there in the afternoon. At the beginning of the season Simon Mayer would give the volunteers a free lesson in how to teach. After that the instructors, including my wife, Jean, would all have lunch together at someone’s house before heading up there to teach. I think the lunch was the main reason most of our wives did it.”

The system has improved over time—snowboarding and cross country are now offered and the town pays every year to have the Skiway’s professional staff give more formal lessons to the volunteers—but the basic format remains the same. Kids start at Level A on the bunny slope and move up at their own rate. Usually by the sixth grade or so they can handle anything the Skiway has to offer. Those are the little buzz-bombs zipping past you on the Lower Gauntlet.

“I was in the Lyme system all the way from nursery school to fifth grade,” recalls Liz McIntyre. “By then I knew that freestyle competition was what I wanted. That’s why I didn’t ski for Dartmouth. They don’t have freestyle on the team and by then I was already competing overseas. After freshman year I took winter terms off. But I grew up loving to watch the College ski team practice. I studied all their moves and copied the ones that I needed.”

As for her late mom’s motives for being one of the instructors, McIntyre’s recollection is a bit different from her dad’s. “The program really depended on those volunteers,” she says, laughing, “and the ladies all did it so that they could get a lesson from Simon.”

It’s been eight or nine years since Liz has been back to Lyme in the wintertime, but now that she’s retired she says she’d love to hit the Skiway again with her family and some of the Lyme friends she grew up with.

“It would be great,” she says. “But, gee, I’d have to buy a lift ticket, wouldn’t I?”

Ed Gray has lived in Lyme for 20 years, long enough so that his kids now have to buy their lift tickets, too.