Like many other Marylanders, Helmuth Heise learned to ski on the snow-covered slopes of Marsh Mountain, a 3,000-foot summit that rises from the shores of Deep Creek Lake in Garrett County.
There's nothing particularly unusual about that accomplishment -- until one learns that Mr. Heise owns the 23 slopes and trails that traverse the eastern face of the mountain. This entrepreneur put on his first skis only after he began transforming a towering, treeless cow pasture into a makeshift slope some 40 years ago.
These days, Mr. Heise, 67, seldom gets to ski his own trails. But his handiwork is now the Wisp Ski Area, a multimillion-dollar enterprise that encompasses 400 acres of Marsh Mountain. The resort -- which includes a $50 million hotel and convention center and an 18-hole golf course -- is the backbone of Garrett County's winter economy.
The Wisp, as the resort is known in these parts, is a major player in the Mid-Atlantic region's growing ski industry, holding its own against new competitors such as the Whitetail Ski Resort in southern Pennsylvania and established players such as Timberline and Canaan Valley in West Virginia.
Though Mr. Heise today can stand proudly atop his mountain and marvel at his creation, the journey has been long and sometimes arduous. He has battled naysayers, mild winters, financial setbacks and, more recently, health problems.
To outsiders, the Wisp is a corporate-owned playground -- bearing no familiar face, no familiar name at its controls. To locals, though, the Wisp and the low-key, hard-working Mr. Heise are one and the same.
Both are survivors. And both rose from humble beginnings.
Mr. Heise was thinking small in 1955 when he enlisted the local Chamber of Commerce in his effort to create a new ski area in Garrett County. He really was after customers for his motel.
The year before he had opened a 10-room establishment down the road on the opposite side of Route 219 from where the Wisp Ski Area is now. The lakeside Will O'the Wisp was successor to a couple dozen rustic cabins his father, a German immigrant, had owned and operated there for a decade after moving to Maryland from Pittsburgh.
For the son, a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia, business was good in the summer because of Deep Creek Lake; boaters, fishermen and vacationers needed rooms. But that first winter was dismal. Mr. Heise, with a wife and a baby to support, rented just two units during a cold, snowy February.
"How could anyone forget that?" he says. "Two cars couldn't get to Oakland because of the snow and we were the only place around. I earned $13 that month."
Mr. Heise learned his lesson: He needed to attract customers during the winter if he was going to stay. "I loved the lake and I wanted to make a living in the area," he says. "That winter started my interest in finding something for the off-season. There was an old family that had a tow rope between Oakland and Deep Creek Lake, and a man there suggested maybe I could get enough customers for my motel with a ski slope."
The Chamber of Commerce endorsed the proposal and secured a $3,000 loan from the state Board of Public Works to create a rough-and-ready ski slope on Marsh Mountain. Mr. Heise and volunteers installed a tow on a leased cow pasture with Army surplus rope and a generator. "We used everything we could find," he says. "We even had Army surplus gloves and skis. We were primitive."
The first lodge was a one-room shack with a dirt floor and a potbellied stove for heat.
"We found out that first weekend that we needed more rental skis," says Mr. Heise, readily admitting that he and his helpers knew absolutely nothing about skiing. "We borrowed some money and went to New York City to buy boots and then to New Hampshire to buy 30 or 40 pairs of skis. The salesman asked, 'What kind of binding do you want?' " Mr. Heise's reply still makes him laugh. "Binding? What's binding?"
His slope had no equipment shop; the skis were rented from the back of a pickup truck. Skiers paid $3.50 for them and about the same amount to use the tow rope.
By the following winter, the Chamber of Commerce had quit the ski venture, so Mr. Heise recruited two business partners, who together bought out the chamber's financial interest. The owners borrowed $17,000 to build a ski lift, installing the equipment themselves. They took turns carrying gasoline up the mountain to feed the lift's engine.
"We had a lot of local interest at first, but if we had 100 [skiers] a day that would have been a lot," Mr. Heise says. "We had no snow-making machines but we had snow fences all around the mountain. People were skiing on drifts.
"I had only 10 rooms in that motel but I was starting to do some business," he recalls.
By the end of the decade, Marsh Mountain, as the ski area was called then, had its first snow-making equipment -- resembling lawn sprinklers -- and had several new trails.
Trucking snow to the slopes remained a regular routine. Martin Heise, 41, the eldest of Mr. Heise's two sons, can recall shoveling snow onto trucks at the Garrett County fairgrounds for transport to the slopes. The boys then would help their father patch heavily skied areas on the mountain.
Wisp's meager beginning was typical of many ski areas that opened across the country at that time, says Stacy Gardner, a spokeswoman for the National Ski Areas Association, a Colorado-based organization that represents ski resorts across the United States. "Like a lot of other businesses, it's a lot more complex to start and run things in the 1990s," she says. "The expectations are greater than ever before among skiers and snowboarders."
One example is the new Whitetail Ski Resort, north of Hagerstown just across the Pennsylvania line, which cost $20 million to develop and build.
"The days of someone getting in on the ground floor and getting a few investors and building from scratch are probably long gone," says Dave Galusha, Eastern regional director for the U.S. Ski Association. "Today corporations are buying existing ski areas because it's so much cheaper than building from the ground up."
At the Wisp, growth was incremental. "We expanded each year," Mr. Heise says. "Everything we made or borrowed went back into the business. There was always something I thought I could do to make the place a little better."
To attract new customers, he began to advertise in newspapers in Baltimore, Cumberland and Morgantown, W.Va. He even used school buses to shuttle Baltimore skiers from the train station in Oakland to the ski area and his motel.
In the 1960s, Mr. Heise -- who had by then bought out his partners -- installed the first chair lift and built an A-frame lodge at the base of the mountain. He also expanded the Will O'the Wisp, adding more rooms and a dining room. "We needed more accommodations and space," he says. "Skiing was becoming more popular and as roads improved, more people started coming from Baltimore and Washington."
As his business grew, Mr. Heise found himself facing resistance from two factions in Garrett County: Farmers who thought his expanding ski operation was spoiling the mountain. And others who wanted a more reliable industry to provide jobs.
"There is that part of Garrett County that thinks we've exploited and ruined its rural perfection," says Martin Heise, now food and beverage director for the Wisp and Will O'the Wisp. "Father has always been one for balanced growth. He's not interested in building, building and exploiting. He never wanted this to become another Ocean City."
Wisp's success added a winter tourist season to the warm-weather one, encouraging other businesses, primarily motels and restaurants, to open in the area. "Wisp has made Garrett County more than a one-season destination," says Tom Jones, director of Garrett County's Economic Development Department.
Mr. Heise has worked with businessmen and officials across the state to promote tourism in Maryland and in Garrett County -- even when that meant rubbing elbows with interests who had never heard of Wisp and Deep Creek Lake. "They didn't even know the place -- had never heard of us and had never been up here," Mr. Heise says. "We were really in the boondocks. We just got used to doing everything ourselves." For Mr. Heise and his wife, Evelyn -- and later his sons, Martin and Gary -- "everything" included promoting the resort, building additions, installing equipment and making snow.
Charles "Chip" Evans, a retired chief gunner's mate for the Navy, worked as an electrician at the Wisp for 20 years and remembers Mr. Heise digging ditches to install lights and snow-making equipment. "There's nothing on that hill that he couldn't do or didn't do," Mr. Evans says. "He cut wood, he painted. . . . They put in that first lift there with practically nothing. He didn't have any machinery to work with but he put that lift in."
"The mountain becomes a part of you," Mr. Heise explains. "My life has been here. There were times that even on Thanksgiving we were out here on the mountain picking up rocks off the slopes. My boys will tell you that. But we still had dinner at home that day."
Mr. Heise did much of the construction work when it came to expanding the Will O'the Wisp in the 1960s and early 1970s. But with expansion came unexpected headaches. In the mid-1970s, the family tore down the old Will O'the Wisp motel to make room for a much larger motel and seven-floor condominium complex along the lake. Things looked good, with nearly half of the planned 47 condominium units sold.
But then a recession hit and the real estate market went flat. "All but one of those owners canceled," Mr. Heise says.
The Heises found themselves on the road to Baltimore, hoping to work out a deal with the bank on how to pay back the loan for the project. "My wife was in tears," he says. "This was the end. There was no way we could repay this." The loan officer agreed that if the Heises could get someone to sell three units by the end of that year, the bank would stick with them. Mrs. Heise sold all the units by the following year.
Evelyn Heise, a 66-year-old West Virginia native, has been her husband's partner all through the years. "There are times when he couldn't have gotten through it without Mother," says Martin Heise. "She's the heart of the Will O' the Wisp."
The Wisp Ski Area, Helmuth Heise believes, came into its own in the prosperous mid-1980s. Expansion helped put the ski resort on the map; it enjoyed steady growth as new lifts and trails were added and the lodge was rebuilt to include a cafeteria, restaurant and bar, ski shop, rental shop and banquet rooms.
The Heises also installed one of the largest "airless" snow-making systems on the Eastern seaboard -- a system that can turn 6,000 to 8,000 gallons of water a minute into snow. Wisp can blanket the mountain with 42 million gallons of snow in about five days.
Two other developments -- a $50 million hotel and convention center, and a $1 million, 18-hole golf course -- made Wisp a year-round resort and lessened its dependence on the ski trade.
All this was accomplished by a man who never had a fortune to work with. Mr. Heise is "not from a wealthy family and has never been a wealthy person," says Mr. Jones, the county economic development official. "It [was] very tough building that resort and he simply had the dogged determination to get the financial resources to build each incremental step."
Mr. Heise would need every bit of that dogged determination in the early 1990s. Another recession hit, and the Wisp endured its greatest financial crisis, one aggravated by several mild winters and a sluggish real estate market. The Wisp defaulted on a $7 million loan from the Bank of Baltimore.
The crisis provoked a flurry of publicity. And when Mr. Heise asked the Garrett County commissioners to seek a federal Community Development Block Grant to keep the ski area from going under, local businessmen and residents rallied to support him. They knew that Wisp had become "the backbone of the winter economy up here," Mr. Jones says.
In the end, Mr. Heise averted foreclosure and avoided having to use a federal grant. He worked with the bank to restructure the loan, and today his payments are current. "We went everywhere looking for money. We were up and down the East Coast," Mr. Heise says. "But I followed my father's advice to keep on going and play it straight. He was a real stickler. He said when you owe somebody, you owe somebody and you pay them back."
Mr. Heise's financial crisis was followed by a personal one -- and this time, too, he would learn something about the support he has in the community. In February 1993, he had quadruple bypass heart surgery at a hospital in Morgantown, W.Va.
From Garrett came an outpouring of community support, get-well cards and letters to the editor in a local weekly, the Republican. "I think he was really surprised and touched that there was such concern," says Martin Heise.
"He's highly respected among business people here," says Ruth Beitzel, owner of the Point View Inn, a motel and restaurant on Deep Creek Lake. "I don't think there's anybody who doesn't respect him."
The ski operation has been profitable the past few years, Mr. Heise says, and the number of skiers has increased steadily. Last season the total was about 140,000. The outlook for this winter, though, is less optimistic. The warm weather in December and the first half of January curtailed the turnout, not only in Maryland but throughout the Mid-Atlantic region.
These days, there's no talk of expansion at the Wisp; since his surgery, Mr. Heise has been working to consolidate the business, preparing for the day when his sons take control. (Gary, 39, is an electrical engineer living in Philadelphia.)
Not much has changed in Mr. Heise's daily routine, though. He still rises about 5:30 a.m. and plows the parking lots, if necessary, and shows up later at the ski resort to spot-check its components, such as the computer room where snow-making is monitored, the rental shop, the cafeteria and the offices.
"He keeps the same hours," Martin Heise says. "He's increasingly more involved in the management only. He works in the banquet room if we need help. He's in the toolshed helping sort parts. His big thing is to mow -- it relaxes him -- but he is in the office a lot."
Helmuth Heise need only glance up at the mountain to see what kind of day is before him -- what kind of challenges he may face. "Not every day here is a good day," he says. "There are days when I wonder why . . . I did this. There isn't a day that goes by that all the problems are solved. But I sleep when I go to bed."
He never imagined that such an enterprise would spring from a cow pasture. "I saw the ski area as a way to fill up a few motel rooms in the winter," Mr. Heise says. "When I look back on how it all started, it sounds great. Whether I would do it again, I don't know."
It's clear, though, that he enjoys his creation. One can easily imagine Mr. Heise perched near a snow-making machine atop the mountain, watching carloads of skiers arrive below and listening to the continual humming of the lifts.
"I get satisfaction in seeing all this activity -- seeing it all start at the beginning of the day," he says. "This is my private domain. I've always enjoyed the mountain."
K=
GREG TASKER is The Sun's Western Maryland correspondent.
DOWNHILL DATA
Last winter's skier totals for six downhill sites, as reported by the ski areas:
* Whitetail, Mercersburg, Pa. -- More than 200,000
* Liberty, Carroll Valley, Pa. -- 150,000
* Wisp, McHenry, Md. -- 140,000
* Roundtop, Lewisberry, Pa. -- More than 100,000
* Canaan Valley, Davis, W.Va. -- 80,000
4( * Timberline, Davis, W.Va. -- 75,000