Maps and Terrain at Pink Panther

The Pink Panther Ski Area was created in a valley that had a creek running through it.  The creek ran through a culvert between the runs so skiers didn't really notice it.  It was located on Old Martin Road (Route 1) in DePere, Wisconsin, just west of Sportsman's Drive.  

This is a google Maps view of the site today.  You can see that the creek has been dammed up to form a large pond.

But thanks to a 1978 Brown County GIS aerial survey, I found a picture of the terrain during the summer of '78, and added some markings to clarify what was there.  The labels are small and not that easy to read, but I wanted the terrain to show through.  (Click on it to make it bigger.)

The three runs were configured in a nice triangle, and the trails ran off to the right of the Headwall's rope tow.  After your final run on the Headwall, you'd have an easy run down the T-Bar Hill and then take the Bunny Tow back to the Lodge.  Earlier configurations had a run from the top of the bunny to the bottom of the Headwall that was called the Intermediate Run, but it faced south and was hard to keep snow on, so they abandoned it (except for the occasional daredevil, according to Mark Cain.)

Here are two sketches of the terrain from SKI Magazine articles in 1974 and 1982 (after they had changed Pink Panther's name to Snowburst.)  We think both sketches may have been done by Jim Ward of the Press Gazette.  He's definitely the author of both the articles that were submitted to SKI Magazine.  You can see the second rope tow on the Headwall in the 1974 sketch.

When I began researching Pink Panther in 2009, I tried to overlay a similar map on the current Terrain.  I was pretty confused by the big pond that I didn't remember from the days of the ski hill operation.  Mark Cain assured me it was a lot smaller back in the day, ran through a culvert between the Bunny and T-Bar, so it would be easy to miss in the winter.  I do remember it being there and coming up fast at the bottom of the Headwall.

(I'm almost sure this 2006 image was from Mapquest or something other than google maps back then.  Isn't that quaint?)