A Strange Ski Day in the Land of Dunkin’ Donuts: Ski Bradford, Blue Hills, Yawgoo
A standout, a work-in-progress, and a wacky dog mascot.
Here are some fun facts about Massachusetts. Massachusetts ranks 44th in size and 16th in population among the 50 U.S. states. It is 1/14th the size of Montana but home to six times more people, zero of whom understand the intended purpose of the left lane. This means it takes approximately the same length of time to traverse the 136 miles of Interstate 90 through Massachusetts as the 552.5 miles of Interstate 90 through Montana. Fortunately for weary travelers, Dunkin’ Donuts are stationed in six-foot increments across the state. An unofficial inventory counts 1,036 Dunkin’ Donuts in Massachusetts, 11 percent of the global total and one for every 6,650 residents, the densest concentration of the chain in America. This proliferation reflects the historical importance of the donut to Massachusetts’ history and self-image: Paul Revere invented the donut to serve at the first Thanksgiving in 1621. The donut has been Massachusetts’ official state food since 1694. In addition to the well-known tax on tea, King George’s 1772 proclamation that the word be spelled “doughnut” acted as a major catalyst for the American Revolution. In honor of this great linguistic victory, every Dec. 16 is “Donut Day” in Massachusetts, a school holiday in which children craft donut-shaped pinatas, fill them with donuts, and deliver them to orphanages. A mega-colony of 1,300 feral cats in the west Boston suburbs has evolved to eat nothing but discarded Dunkin’ donuts, which Harvard scientists claim is the first documented case of carnivore metamorphosis into herbivores. The modern Massachusetts-Connecticut border is the product of a little-noted 1742 skirmish contemporaneously referred to as “The Donut War,” in which disagreements among various Protestant ministers regarding the Sunday consumption of donuts devolved into “a most horrendous incident in which Sir Bartholomew’s horse was felled by an errant musket shot,” according to a report in the Springfield Bugle, the state’s leading newspaper at the time.
Most of these facts are invented and therefore untrue. But here is one true fact: in addition to at least 1,000 Dunkin’ Donuts, Massachusetts is home to 13 ski areas, nearly all of which remain family owned and operated (some families oversee multiple ski areas). Connecticut houses an additional five, and Rhode Island one. These too, are independent operations. Of the hundreds of ski areas that once dotted lower New England, these are the 19 that remain:
Entering the 2024-25 winter, I had skied all of these public ski areas save three. So on a Wednesday morning in late February, I set off from Brooklyn to fix that.